


A Godfather Like Him

by Lomonaaeren



Series: From Samhain to the Solstice 2020 [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Drama, Family Drama, Gen, Grey Sirius Black, Malfoy Manor, Mind Healers (Harry Potter), Not Canon Compliant - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:42:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27498160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: Sequel to “How Like Hatred” and “A Name Like Henry.” Harry comes home for the summer, and it really is a relief to be at Malfoy Manor with his parents and brother—at first. But then he finds out a secret that they’ve been keeping from him, and gets the news that Sirius Black has broken out of Azkaban. Plus he has to go a Mind-Healer. Harry isn’t sure which one is worst, frankly.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy & Harry Potter, Hermione Granger & Harry Potter & Ron Weasley, Lucius Malfoy & Harry Potter, Lucius Malfoy/Narcissa Black Malfoy, Narcissa Black Malfoy & Harry Potter, Sirius Black & Harry Potter
Series: From Samhain to the Solstice 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1993852
Comments: 163
Kudos: 1158





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Make sure you read the first two stories in the series before this one. I’m posting this as part of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fic series, and it should have between four and six chapters.

“Mother will say if they can visit.”

“They can visit.” Harry scowled at his brother as they stepped off the train.

Draco pointed his nose at the train ceiling, and let Harry see that he’d done none too good at a job at cleaning out his nostrils that morning. “I know that _my_ friends won’t insult anyone. You can’t say the same about Weasley.”

“Ron wouldn’t have said anything if you hadn’t insulted his rat!”

“ _Rat_ is a misleading term. _Dust rag_ would be more accurate.”

Harry opened his mouth to retort, and Ron pushed past them hard enough to make it clear that he’d heard. His ears were bright red, and Scabbers was clinging to his shoulder and squeaking in alarm. Harry gave Draco a dirty look and ran after Ron, catching up with him just as he was getting off the train.

“Not right now, okay, mate?” Ron turned his head away from him.

Harry sighed. He knew Ron wasn’t really upset about Scabbers. It was the reminder that he was poor, and even if Harry had turned out to be Henry Malfoy instead of Harry Potter, he’d just gone from one rich family to another. And Draco could say volumes about wealth with a _look._

“All right. Write to me when you can, okay? I want both you and Hermione to come over this summer.”

Ron glanced at him, then nodded. “We’ll see,” he said, just before he saw his parents and ran towards them. Ginny tagged after him with a blush for Harry. Harry was glad that she at least seemed less shy and withdrawn than she had at the beginning of the year.

He shook his head as he watched Gilderoy Lockhart step off the train. It was kind of a pity that something terrible hadn’t happened to him the way it had to Professor Quirrell, but Lockhart had announced that he wouldn’t be coming back for a second year as the Defense professor because he had “fans to please and books to write.” So there was that.

“Henry!”

Harry turned around more quickly at the sound of that name than he had at the beginning of the winter term, and saw Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy waving at him from the end of the platform. He started towards them, Hedwig flying out the train door ahead of him. She was just as happy _not_ to be spending the summer in a cage.

 _Mother and Father,_ Harry reminded himself as he leaned close and let Mrs. Malfoy hug him. _I should think of them as Mother and Father when I’m around them._

It was still difficult, though. Especially if what Draco had said in their argument was true. From the way he was standing with his nose still in the air and his cheeks flushed a smug pink, he’d already told the Malfoys— _Mother and Father_ —about it, and expected to get his way.

“Henry darling,” Mrs. Malfoy said, gently putting her arm around his shoulders, “Draco told me that you’d like to invite some children from Slytherin over to the house during the summer and thought they might not be welcome. Of course they will be. I wanted to reassure you about that.”

“They’re _not_ from Slytherin,” Harry said, and tried to ignore the feeling of alarm that flashed through him when he saw how Mr. Malfoy’s face changed. But he persisted, because being afraid of his own family wasn’t going to help him achieve anything that he wanted. “They’re Ron and Hermione. Maybe Neville. They’re all from Gryffindor.”

“The Ron boy is Arthur Weasley’s youngest son?” Mr. Malfoy asked.

Harry threw him a defiant glance, remembering the way that Mr. Malfoy— _his father_ —and Mr. Weasley had fought in the bookshop last summer. “Yes, he is. My best friend.”

“And Hermione is Granger,” Draco butted in, his face flushing with more than temper from the look of it. “From _no_ distinguished family.”

“I really hoped that the next word out of your mouth isn’t about to be _Mudblood_ , Draco,” Harry hissed, softly enough that most of the people passing by them on the platform wouldn’t hear.

“Draco. What have I told you about that word?”

Mrs. Malfoy sounded gentle, but that tone held steel underneath. Harry knew that tone. It was the kind that she had used to tell Harry that he _would_ be going to a Mind-Healer this summer. He sneered at Draco from behind his mother’s back when Draco caught his eye.

“That I shouldn’t say it in public.”

“Well, don’t,” Harry snapped, although he felt a jolt of pain that apparently, Mrs. Malfoy hadn’t just forbidden Draco from saying that word altogether. “And Neville is Neville Longbottom. I _like_ them. They’re my _friends._ If Draco can have his friends over, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to—”

“Of course, of course.” Mr. Malfoy made a little patting motion on the air. “No one has said that you can’t.”

“Draco said you would say I can’t!”

“They’re _Gryffindors._ ”

“So _what_?”

“Not in public, boys,” Mrs. Malfoy said, and led Harry away from the platform with her arm still around his shoulders. Harry tugged at his trunk, but Mrs. Malfoy lightened it with a tap of her wand, and a slight glance at Harry. “Why would you think we wouldn’t let your friends come over?” she added, as Mr. Malfoy fell behind with Draco. Mr. Malfoy looked like he wanted to say something private to Harry’s older brother. Harry viciously hoped that it would be about what a git Draco was.

“Because Draco said that you would be the one to give permission,” Harry muttered, and ignored, as best as he could, the impulse to kick at the ground. Now that he came to think about it, Draco hadn’t actually _said_ that their parents would forbid it. He’d just implied it. “And he said that his friends wouldn’t insult anyone, but Ron would. That was after he insulted Ron for being a Weasley.”

Mrs. Malfoy shook her head. “The main problem I can see in our inviting Mr. Weasley over is the lack of permission from his parents, rather than Mr. Weasley himself.”

“Oh.” Harry tried to relax his tense shoulders, but Mrs. Malfoy seemed to know that was what he was doing, and gave him a single, affectionate squeeze before she let go.

“It’s all right, Henry,” she said. “You and Draco couldn’t get along perfectly forever. You’re siblings. It’s natural for siblings to fight.” She sounded like she was speaking from experience.

“Um. I wouldn’t know.”

“Of course not. But you will find that it will be fine.”

Harry did his best to relax further as they arrived at the Apparition point outside the station. “Okay.”

Mrs. Malfoy smiled down at him, and then they whirled in place and were gone.

*

“Henry! Mother wants to see you.”

At least Draco didn’t appear to think it was a good idea to talk about friends coming over for the summer any time soon. Harry looked up from his Potions essay and found his twin brother standing in the doorway of Harry’s room, studying him intently. “All right.” Harry put down his quill.

“Why are you holding your quill like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re trying to strangle it to death.”

Harry bristled as he passed Draco. “Just because _some_ of us were born able to buy quetzal-feather quills if we want—”

“You were, too!”

“It’s not like I grew up knowing that, though, did I? It’s not the same—quit _following_ me.”

“Mother thought you might not be able to find her rooms by yourself,” Draco said, and sped up a little, as though he wanted to get in front of Harry. “You haven’t been to this part of the house very often.”

Harry shot him a skeptical glance, and then came to a stop altogether as they reached the bottom of a grand, sweeping staircase (there were _always_ staircases like that in Malfoy Manor, from what Harry had been able to tell). There was a small creature standing in front of him and staring up at him with his mouth open.

“The Great Harry Potter is Henry Malfoy,” whispered the elf.

“ _Dobby_?”

“No, his name isn’t Dobby,” said Draco hastily, whipping around in front of Harry and standing tall as if he would be able to hide the house-elf from sight. That didn’t work well with such a wide staircase, of course. Harry simply stepped to the side and stared at Dobby again. Draco hopped in front of him. “ _His_ name is—Shobby. Yes, that’s it.”

“No, I know Dobby,” Harry said softly, his mind flying back to the summer before second year again and how Dobby had shown up at his relatives’ house. Well, no, the Dursleys’ house. He shook his head. Thinking of Lily and James Potter as his parents was still something he wasn’t entirely over.

And then his mind snapped back to the far more disturbing evidence in front of him.

He narrowed his eyes at Draco. “Dobby said that his family was evil and treated him badly.”

“Dobby would never be saying that about the great and noble Malfoyses!” Dobby exclaimed.

Harry blinked at Dobby, and Dobby held out his hands with a pleading expression. Harry understood _that_ well enough, at least. It was the way he had sometimes looked when one of his primary teachers noticed something out of the ordinary at the Dursleys’ and tried to help him. Dobby didn’t think Harry could do anything, and he was begging Harry not to get him in trouble.

“Boys, what is the matter?”

And now Mrs. Malfoy was climbing the stairs from the bottom, her frown faint and reminding Harry of the kind that Aunt Petunia would wear when someone mentioned Harry in public. Dobby squeaked and bowed and began to wring his ears. Draco sighed as if he thought that meant the problem was solved and darted over to stand at his mother’s side.

Harry folded his arms.

“ _You_ were the ones who were going to do something evil at Hogwarts and mistrusted Dobby?”

Mrs. Malfoy reached out a hand. “Henry, darling—”

“Did you mistreat him?” Harry backed up and away a step. He glanced over his shoulder, quickly, but then quickly back towards Mrs. Malfoy, because he had figured out what happened when he removed his eyes for too long a time from someone in front of him. “Dobby said that his masters would punish him for warning me, and that they were cruel. What did you _do_ to him?”

“Nothing,” Mrs. Malfoy said. “Truly, Henry, my word. House-elves are—formed such that they punish themselves when upset. What Dobby got upset with, I don’t know. Why he would have sought you out in the middle of a Muggle neighborhood…” She shook her head.

Harry narrowed his eyes. Last year, the subtleties of what she was saying would have passed him right by, but not anymore. “Just because you don’t know doesn’t mean you can’t _guess._ And you didn’t actually finish the sentence about why he would have tried to find me when I lived with Muggles.”

“Henry—”

“Dobby,” Harry said strongly, staring past Mrs. Malfoy’s shoulder at the elf, “can you answer me now that _I’m_ a Malfoy? What was the evil plot?”

Dobby slowly stopped twisting his ears and looked up at Harry. His eyes quivered as much as the rest of his face, and then big tears slipped out of them and down his face. He flung himself on the ground and started wailing, beating his fists on the carpet.

Harry grimaced. That hadn’t been what he meant to do, and he hurried down the steps and caught Dobby’s fists. Dobby nearly kicked him in the jaw before he seemed to get control of himself and stop moving, but then he sniffled and stared at Harry in tragic silence.

“Are you still under orders not to speak about it?” That was the only thing Harry could think of that would make Dobby behave like this now that Harry was part of the same family.

Dobby nodded, looking relieved. “Dobby wishes he could to the young Master Malfoy, who was the Great Harry Potter!” he said, and then made a motion of locking his lips with a key. “But Big Master Malfoy—”

“Dobby.”

That was Mrs. Malfoy’s voice, and Harry shivered a little from how cold it was. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Mrs. Malfoy staring at Dobby, her hand clenched down on Draco’s shoulder as if she thought that she would have to keep him from moving and going to Harry. Harry didn’t think Draco would actually try, though. He looked frozen with shock.

“That will be all, Dobby. You may go.”

Dobby bowed his head and vanished from his lying position on the carpet. Harry turned around to face his mother and brother again.

And yeah, they were still his, even though Harry could feel a sick, dizzying spiral in the middle of his chest and head. They weren’t good people. He should have known that no relatives of his could actually be good people, he told himself. The Dursleys weren’t, and the Potters were kidnappers, and the Malfoys hurt house-elves.

He should have known. He was cursed. He was tainted. Nothing _good_ ever came his way.

“Henry,” Mrs. Malfoy whispered.

“Narcissa? What is going on?”

Mr. Malfoy appeared at the bottom of the stairs, a tense frown on his face. Harry glared at him and said the first thing that came into his head. “So how often do you make the house-elves punish themselves?”

Mr. Malfoy twitched a little, but only a little. They were all so alike, Harry thought. All the Malfoys. The _other_ Malfoys. Cold and frozen and beautiful.

Not him. He wasn’t like that, no matter how much he might look like it. And again the sick spiral threatened to dump him on the floor.

He’d wanted a family. And that didn’t work out, of course, because it _never_ did.

“I do not often need to do so,” Mr. Malfoy said. “Many of our servants anticipate our needs perfectly and never need to be punished.”

“Dobby, though,” Harry said flatly. “You told him to not to talk to me about whatever evil plot he wanted to report to me—which means there _was_ something. He’s not just making it up. What was it, _Mr. Malfoy_?”

“I had hoped you were past the point of childish behavior in which you attempted to distance yourself from me with that name, Henry.”

Harry laughed wildly as the house spun around him again. “ _Harry_. It’s _Harry_. I should have known this is what would happen. You still aren’t answering my questions, and you hurt the people who cook and clean for you—you’re like the Dursleys!”

A stormcloud came and went over Mr. Malfoy’s face. Then he said, “If you come into my study, I will tell you all about it.”

“Why do you mistreat house-elves?”

“House-elves are servants. They are meant to—”

“That’s what the Dursleys said about _me._ ”

A wave of something pure and cold seemed to move through Harry, and then struck out from him. The stained-glass window that overlooked the staircase abruptly shattered, shards of red and blue and green flying through the air and scattering around them like the petals of an unfolding flower.

Mr. Malfoy shouted something incoherent and jerked his wand up. There was a dome of blue light over his head in half a second, and then it extended over Harry and Mrs. Malfoy and Draco. Harry watched the shards of glass falling around them in soft pattering twinkles of dust, and felt nothing.

“Henry.”

Mr. Malfoy’s voice was frozen, again. Harry looked at him, and felt none of the apprehension he would have felt that morning if his father was angry at him.

“With me.”

Mr. Malfoy walked towards his study. Harry knew, because Draco had told him, that it was the room where punishments were assigned and scoldings took place. Draco had made it sound like the scoldings were worse than the punishments.

Harry walked behind Mr. Malfoy, and felt nothing at all.


	2. Chapter 2

“You must know this is an unacceptable way to behave.’

Harry kept silent, staring over Mr. Malfoy’s head and out the window of the study. It was enchanted to give some kind of view of a winter forest under a blanket of silver snow. Harry wished that he could be like that. Frozen and still, instead of already sick and wanting to shout again. The numbness that had overcome him when they were on their way to the study had already left him again.

“Henry, are you listening to me?”

“Yes. It’s an unacceptable way to behave,” Harry droned.

That had always been enough to get him out of trouble with Uncle Vernon, but Mr. Malfoy narrowed his eyes and leaned forwards from behind the huge ebony desk where he probably plotted the kind of evil deeds that Dobby had tried to warn him about. “I want you to understand what I mean.”

“I understand that exploding your windows makes you angrier than endangering students at Hogwarts does, sure.”

Mr. Malfoy pursed his lips and closed his eyes, exhaling hard. Then, utterly startling Harry, he stood up from behind the desk and gestured to the sleek silver couch on the other side of the study, the same color as the image of the forest outside the window.

Harry went and sat on it, his face pinched. Maybe that made him look more like a real Malfoy. But he still didn’t _feel_ that way.

Mr. Malfoy sat on the couch next to him. He bent down and peered into Harry’s eyes. Harry stared back and tried his best to put all his disgust and anger into the glare.

They treated Dobby the way the Dursleys used to treat _him_. If they thought one thing was wrong, they should think the other thing was wrong, too. But they weren’t falling all over themselves to tell _Dobby_ that he had to see a Mind-Healer. And Harry thought they would have kept him from seeing Dobby forever if they could.

The anger built and beat under his breastbone, and Mr. Malfoy’s desk began to tremble.

“Listen to me, Henry,” Mr. Malfoy said softly, and took his hand. Harry started, and the magic faded away. Mr. Malfoy kept staring intently at him.

“Yes,” Mr. Malfoy said.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I was plotting something to do with the school,” Mr. Malfoy said, and sighed. “At the time, it—made sense. It would have caused the kind of chaos that would distract certain enemies in the Ministry from our family, and it would have discredited someone I hate. And it would have…” He hesitated for so long that Harry thought he wouldn’t start speaking again, but finally he did. “It would have made the Dark Lord look on us with favor.”

Harry ripped his hand away, but Mr. Malfoy didn’t move. He kept sitting there and staring, and Harry hated it. For the first time in his life, he appreciated the fact that the Dursleys had sent him to his cupboard when he got angry at them. It meant it was easier to think and unwind in the darkness.

He couldn’t get _away_ with Mr. Malfoy staring at him like this. Harry clenched his hands into fists in his lap and threw his words like curses instead. “So, how soon are you going to turn me over to him?”

Mr. Malfoy’s eyes closed. “I would never do that to a child of mine, Henry.”

“Yes, you would.”

“I have asked you before to think before you speak—”

“You did your plot, whatever it was, with Draco _right in the school_ ,” Harry snapped at him. “How did you know it wouldn’t hurt him?”

Mr. Malfoy’s eyes opened, and he stared down at Harry for a long moment. He was probably thinking before he spoke, Harry thought, unable not to feel the boil of fury through his veins.

“I—was led to believe that the object would only hurt those who were of half blood or less,” said Mr. Malfoy at last.

“And you didn’t care about me when you thought I was the Potters’ child.”

“No.” Mr. Malfoy swallowed. “I hated you.”

Harry nodded. His fury had changed. He felt odd, light, floating, airy. It was as if a horrible thing had happened, but it was almost a relief, because he’d been anticipating the horrible thing so long and now it had happened and it couldn’t hurt him anymore.

“You hated me, and you hate me now.”

“ _What_? No—”

“You tried to keep the fact that you treat house-elves horribly away from me.” Harry stared at him, and his eyes were bright and tearless, and he spoke the words without knowing he was going to speak them. “Instead of changing the way that you treat house-elves, or your opinion about people who are half-bloods or Muggleborns, you just tried to keep me away from the elves and took the object, whatever it was, out of the school. You didn’t really change at all. I should have known, I suppose.”

“I am turning away from the Dark Lord. For you.”

Harry kept talking, while Mr. Malfoy’s words were like a blow that he stepped aside from. “It doesn’t really matter. I never had anyone who loved me growing up. It turns out that my parents, I mean, the people I thought were my parents, were my kidnappers. And now you don’t really want to change. You’re making the smallest changes possible. That’s okay. I can live with this.”

“ _Henry._ Please.”

Mr. Malfoy sounded agonized, but Harry just looked at him and shook his head. “I’m not important enough to make the big changes for.”

“That is not true.” Mr. Malfoy reached out and put his arms around Harry, but this time, it didn’t feel like a father hugging him. Nothing could get through the bright shell that had wrapped around Harry. “I love you. I have always longed for you. We told Draco stories of you when we thought that was all we would ever have, so that he could get to know you, too.”

“You loved the person you thought I was,” Harry corrected him. “Someone who was a pureblood and would be happy to live with the way you treated house-elves and whatever plot you were cooking up to put in the school. Something to do with Heir of Slytherin, I suppose?” he sighed, disappointed with himself for not seeing it earlier. “The Petrifications stopped after Christmas. When you took whatever it was out of the school.”

“Henry.”

“Are you going to treat house-elves better?”

Mr. Malfoy hesitated.

Harry stood up, and shrugged Mr. Malfoy’s arms off him, and walked out of the room.

*

“You can’t stay in there forever, Henry.”

“Watch me.”

Harry said the words flatly, staring up at the ceiling of his room. He hadn’t decorated it with all the things he would have liked, but so what? The Malfoys weren’t his family, not really.

“You have to _eat_ something.”

“I’m using to doing without.”

From the sound of it, Draco had kicked the door. Harry entertained a brief fantasy of Mrs. Malfoy getting angry at him for the dent he had probably put in the door, and then snorted to himself. Who said it would last? The house-elves would come along and magic it away, and if it did stay for some weird reason, then Mrs. Malfoy would blame Harry.

Because they did. They blamed him for seeing Dobby and caring about him, instead of blaming themselves for not treating Dobby the right way and trying to hide him from Harry.

Footsteps down the corridor said that Draco was going away, and Harry tried to close his eyes and sleep, even though he _was_ hungry. But a loud pop sounded in front of him, and Harry scrambled over and reached for the wand under his pillow.

Dobby was there, bowing, holding a tray full of what looked like bowls of soup and a covered platter that smelled like chicken. Harry licked his lips and said, “I’m not hungry,” while his stomach growled.

“Great Master Harry Potter is being hungry,” Dobby said, in a voice that sounded like experience, and set the tray down on the table next to his bed. “Perhaps Great Master Harry Potter can be eating something? For Dobby?”

House-elves sure had big green teary eyes when they wanted to use them, Harry thought grumpily. He lifted the cover off the platter and swallowed when he saw the chicken sitting there, in delicate bits draped with some kind of sauce that made them smell like a few meals he’d cooked for the Dursleys that he never got to eat.

“Do you swear that they haven’t put any curses or potions on the food?” he asked Dobby without taking his eyes from the chicken, or the fork that had materialized beside the platter. He was sure that it hadn’t been there a second before.

“They are not putting anything in the food! Theys never come in the kitchens.”

Well, at least that made sense, Harry thought as he picked up the fork. Preparing food was probably beneath a Malfoy.

And didn’t that prove that he _wasn’t_ one?

Harry sighed, but he was hungry enough that he ate some of the chicken and a small piece of the treacle tart. As soon as he’d eaten enough food that he didn’t think his stomach would grumble, he put the fork down.

“Great Master Harry Potter is not wanting more?”

Harry shook his head as he turned to Dobby. “I have to show them they can’t manipulate me this way. And why are you calling me Harry Potter?”

Dobby froze and then clapped a hand over his eyes. “Does Great Master—does he not wants me to?”

“No. Right now, I prefer it.” Harry sighed and looked off at the wall, at the enchanted window that showed a vision of the ocean. He’d set it that way thinking he might find the roll of the waves soothing, but it hadn’t happened.

“Dobby, what do they do to you?”

Dobby cautiously came forwards and stood staring up at him. Harry looked back down, and nodded encouragingly. “I know that you can’t tell me anything about the evil plot in the school. I’m not asking that. I’m just asking how the Malfoys treat you.”

Dobby swallowed. “They bes getting upset when Dobby be being stupid and slow. They tells Dobby to shut his ears in the oven and his fingers in doors. And they gets upset if Dobby spill the tea. They tells him that he’s a bad elf and send him off to sit in the elf quarters in the kitchen and think about what he’s done.”

“What are the elf quarters like?”

“Cold. And dark.”

_Like the cupboard._

Harry felt the sickening spiral of emotion unfolding in the center of his chest again, but this time, it was a lot colder. Like the cupboard. Like the elf quarters. And ready to burst into flame again at a moment’s notice.

“Thank you, Dobby,” he said. “I’m going to try and do something to get this changed. They don’t have the right to treat you like that, or the other elves.”

“Master Harry Potter must not be doing that!” Dobby whispered at once, harshly, his eyes darting around as if he thought one of the walls was going to come to life and hurt him. “The Masters Malfoy would be knowing that you is knowing, and—and—”

“You think they would make it worse for you?” Harry asked. He could understand that. The Dursleys had reacted like that when they thought someone had figured out what Harry’s home life was like, even though no one had ever cared enough to actually _help him._

Harry tried to stuff the bitterness back into its own cupboard in his mind, but it was hard.

Dobby bobbed his head so fast that the tears forming in his eyes flew away and landed on the floor.

“All right, I won’t do that,” Harry said, and reached out to pat Dobby on the head, ignoring the way that he immediately burst into wails of adoration. There was a time that he might have done the same thing, if someone had ever cared enough to pay attention. “But I’ll figure out some way, okay?”

“Master Harry Potter is being great,” Dobby breathed, and then he picked up the tray and vanished with it.

Harry lay back on his bed and scowled at the ceiling. Now he just had to figure out what the best thing to do would be. Should he ask for Dobby to be his personal elf? Or would it be better if Dobby was permanently free and could leave behind Malfoy Manor forever?

A wave of homesickness washed over him—for Hogwarts, nowhere else. The Dursleys’ house had never been home.

But more and more, it was seeming as if Malfoy Manor probably wasn’t, either.

*

“Mind-Healer Letham has been waiting on you for the past half-hour.”

Mrs. Malfoy’s words were probably meant to be a gentle scold, but Harry could only hear echoes of all the times that Aunt Petunia had ever said he’d disappointed her and the like. He nodded back to Mrs. Malfoy and walked into the small grey sitting room where it seemed the Mind-Healer was.

It was a surprise to find out that the Mind-Healer was a woman, even though Harry hadn’t heard her first name. He’d just assumed “Healer Letham” had to be a man. He took a deep breath and walked towards her through the low grey couches and stuffed chairs, trying not to compare her to Mrs. Figg, even though she looked about the same age and had grey hair.

No smell of cats around her, though. At least there was that.

And then the woman glanced up as Harry came to a halt in front of the couch where she was sitting, and he only barely kept from jerking back. Her eyes were a piercing, clear blue, and she looked at him as if she was going to use her eyes like spoons and scoop the inside of his head out.

No. Definitely not like Mrs. Figg.

“Mr. Malfoy? A pleasure to meet you.” The woman gave him an odd, shallow bow without rising from the couch. “My name is Marianna Letham. I’m pleased that you could join me.”

Harry flushed, although he didn’t actually hear sarcasm in those last words. “Um. Yes, Healer Letham. Thank you.”

He found himself glancing over his shoulder at Mrs. Malfoy for reassurance, then remembered that he was angry at all of them and he shouldn’t be doing that. He jerked his eyes back around, and heard his “mother” sigh a little and retreat. The door of the sitting room closed, and Harry stared at Healer Letham and wondered where she worked.

It occurred to him that that was a good question, especially if the Malfoys were paying her to be here and wanted her to “heal him” of certain things. So he sat down and asked.

“I used to work for St. Mungo’s,” said Healer Letham, rearranging herself a little so that she was sitting with one leg tucked up beneath her and the other dangling down towards the floor. It looked uncomfortable for a woman her age, but Harry wasn’t going to mention it if she wanted to sit that way. “But they wanted me to treat too many people who hadn’t a thing wrong with their heads, who were cursed and should have been seen by the Healers in the Spell Damage Ward. So I left and became a private Mind-Healer working with children.”

“That doesn’t make sense, though. Why would they want you to work with people who were cursed?”

Healer Letham snorted. “Politics. I had a high rate of success with my patients, so they thought that meant I should be willing to heal rich idiots, and idiots high in the Ministry. No matter what was wrong with them.”

“Oh.” Harry folded his arms. “Well, I don’t have anything wrong with me.”

Healer Letham studied him. “No, I don’t think that’s true.”

“How would _you_ know? You didn’t cast a diagnostic charm or anything!”

“No. But I know the signs. You sit on that chair as though the whole world wronged you. And, well, at your age, that doesn’t usually happen unless you have some amount of trauma.”

“You _know_ that Voldemort killed my adoptive parents when I was one, right?”

“And I know that you never received treatment or healing for it, if you’re sitting like that.”

Harry paused. She hadn’t flinched when he said Voldemort’s name. That was actually pretty good. Or good enough to make him give her a chance.

“Well, no,” he admitted. “I don’t think anyone thought I should. I didn’t even know I was a wizard until about two years ago. My relatives are Muggles. They wouldn’t have thought to take me to a Mind-Healer.”

“Or a Muggle equivalent? I know they exist. And I must admit I am curious how a Malfoy comes to have recent relatives in the Muggle world.”

Harry flushed. “I mean—they’re not really my aunt and uncle and cousin. I know that now. Not related by blood. But I thought they were at the time. I thought I was the child of James and Lily Potter.”

Healer Letham nodded as if that had clarified something for her. “Very well. So you didn’t receive treatment or healing from any trauma that you endured when your adoptive parents died. And what was living with your Muggles like?”

Harry flinched before he could stop himself. He knew Healer Letham would have seen it, but he still said, “Fine. Not great, but fine.”

Healer Letham gave him a direct stare. “You seem like an intelligent young man, so we both know that’s not true.”

“Well, _here_ isn’t any better!” Harry snapped. “The Malfoys don’t make me do chores like the Dursleys did, but they make the house-elves do it! And the house-elves _beat_ themselves! And they were going to do something, I don’t know what, at Hogwarts! And Mr. Malfoy followed Voldemort. He claims he was under Imperius, but I don’t believe it.”

Healer Letham leaned forwards. “Neither do I,” she said in a loud whisper.

Harry’s mouth fell open, and then he found himself giggling without thinking about it. He leaned back on the chair a little, and studied the Healer at more length. She smiled back at him, not entirely at ease, but calm. Calm was better than most people in the house had been for the last few days, Harry thought. Draco shouted every time he tried to talk to Harry, Mr. Malfoy kept making excuses, Mrs. Malfoy was sad and tried to make him talk about other things, and Dobby cried every time Harry saw him.

“Why are you saying that?” he asked. “Don’t you work for the Malfoys?”

“They’re paying me. I work for _you_. I’m on your side against them, if you need me to be. And I find it interesting that you don’t see yourself as one of them.”

Harry looked away for a second. Then he said, “They’ve been—they really want me, but it’s not the me I really am.”

“What do they want?”

“Someone who doesn’t sympathize with house-elves. Someone who didn’t grow up in the Muggle world. Someone who wasn’t adopted by the Potters. Someone who isn’t a Gryffindor. Someone who _feels_ like a pureblood.” Harry rushed the words out, and then turned back to her. “Mr. Malfoy even said that he hated me when I was still Harry Potter.”

“Yes?”

Healer Letham seemed calm about it, which Harry couldn’t understand. He stared at her. “He hated me! How can he go from hating me and then start _liking_ me in just a few months? He only likes the person he wants me to be.”

“Ah.” Healer Letham moved so that this time, her other foot was tucked up under her and the one that had been tucked was dangling towards the floor. “Well, keep in mind that they may have mythologized you in their own minds. In fact, from what your mother told me, that is exactly what happened. They didn’t know where you had gone or what had happened to you, so they told stories about you, about what you might have been like. It’s not easy to go from that to a living child, no matter how desperately happy you are to find him again.”

“So I should feel sorry for _them_?”

“Not exactly,” Healer Letham said, with that calmness that made Harry keep shutting up. “But let me say that I find it easy to believe both that your father could have hated you as a Potter, instantly loved you when he found out that you were his son, and now doesn’t know how to deal with the middle.”

“I don’t know how to deal with it, either.”

“I know. And I’m here to help you deal with it. We don’t have to do anything right away. I fully expect this to be a process of many months.”

“But you said that you work for me.”

“Yes. What of it?”

“What if I tell you to go away?”

Healer Letham smiled at him again. “I’m on your side, and I’ll fight for you—even against your own trauma that is keeping you from seeing how much you need healing.” She held up a hand when Harry glared at her. “But any particular session that you want to end, we can end. Do you want to be done with this one?”

Harry fidgeted back and forth on the chair. He did and he didn’t. He didn’t like the thought of a Mind-Healer talking to him like he was some broken doll she was trying to piece back together, but on the other hand, this was the only time that he’d really got to _talk_ to someone since finding out about Dobby.

He sighed. “I want to tell you about Dobby, and have you help me figure out how to help him.”

“I can do that. Why don’t you tell me more?”

*

Harry wandered slowly away from the Manor into the beautiful gardens, and sat down near a pond that had a curving, graceful fountain of white stone in the middle of it. It was shaped almost like a dolphin, but not completely. Not really. Harry sighed and shook his head. Sometimes he couldn’t believe that he lived in a place so _rich._

He looked out into the gardens, and watched darkness creeping up among the trees and the flowers. He kept turning over what had happened with Healer Letham this afternoon in his mind, and what he was going to do in the morning.

Healer Letham had agreed that it was a good idea to ask Dobby to be his personal elf. Freeing him was possible, but she thought it would lead to more tension between him and the Malfoys than it would solve, and Dobby would have a hard time finding another place that he could go or a job he could hold.

So Harry would have to talk to Mr. Malfoy in the morning and ask about having Dobby assigned to him. And never hurt by anyone else ever again, or ordered to hurt himself.

 _That_ was going to be a fun conversation.

He watched the sunlight sink further and further, and admitted to himself, finally, that he did feel better after talking with Healer Letham. She hadn’t miraculously cured him of anything—and he didn’t think there was any cure for thinking of himself as Harry Potter, and he wouldn’t want it if there was—but at least she agreed with him about some things.

And she had told him some things he could do about the Malfoys other than just getting Dobby for his elf. Harry was going to try that.

One of the white peacocks squawked and fled across the garden with its tail trailing behind it, beating its wings frantically and flying maybe a meter before landing again. Harry snickered. They really were ridiculous creatures, something Draco got defensive about every time Harry mentioned it.

“Are you Harry? Or the other one?”

Harry spun around, grabbing his wand from his robe pocket even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to use magic over the summer. But there was someone out here who wasn’t a house-elf or a Malfoy, and he knew that meant they weren’t _supposed_ to be here.

“Who is it?” he asked, his eyes darting around, and wishing for once that it wasn’t so dark.

“ _Lumos_.”

A wand lit up, and there was a man sitting on the grass maybe three meters away from him, a horribly thin man with black hair hanging around his face. He looked at Harry with a kind of desperate, crazed hunger that made Harry swallow. His first thought was Voldemort, but he didn’t look anything like the red eyes Harry had seen on the back of Professor Quirrell’s head.

“I think you have to be Harry,” whispered the man. “The other one would have run screaming for his Mummy and Daddy by now.” He spat the last words, and his grey eyes lit up with a terrible contempt. He looked exactly the way Uncle Vernon always had when talking about foreigners.

Harry didn’t know why he made the jump to the right conclusion. Except, maybe, that the eyes looked like Draco and Mrs. Malfoy’s, and his when he looked into the mirror and got taken by surprise, and he knew Mrs. Malfoy was a Black.

“Are you Sirius Black?” he asked.

The man leaped back and transformed, in the middle of the leap, into a giant black dog. He streaked away into the darkness before Harry could even close his mouth.

Harry stared at where he’d sat. So Sirius Black had somehow escaped from Azkaban and then come onto the Malfoy property—the one with wards that he wasn’t supposed to be able to cross, except did they keep dogs out?—and he’d betrayed the Potters and kidnapped Harry in the first place and he was _here._

Harry drew his breath in to yell.

Then, slowly, he closed his mouth again.

For someone who was mad, the man hadn’t actually hurt him. And right now, Harry felt more like Harry Potter than he did a Malfoy.

Harry glanced back towards the Manor, and then got up and walked in that direction as he heard Mrs. Malfoy calling for him, but he kept his mouth shut and walked as though he hadn’t just seen a crazed man turn into a dog and run away.

It had felt good to talk to Healer Letham and get some secrets out. But the Malfoys still hadn’t apologized for keeping Dobby away from Harry, or lying to him about whatever the evil plot at Hogwarts had been.

Harry thought he was due a secret of his own.


	3. Chapter 3

“So I was wondering if I could have Dobby as my personal elf.”

Mr. Malfoy choked on his tea.

The Malfoys had seemed hopeful when Harry came down to breakfast that morning. Mrs. Malfoy had beamed and given him a biscuit. Mr. Malfoy had given Harry several smiles over the top of his newspaper. Draco had scooted his chair over to sit exactly beside Harry’s and kept trying to make plans to fly with him.

Harry had smiled and answered them and eaten the biscuit. And now this.

“Why, Henry?” Mr. Malfoy asked, putting the paper down and giving Harry his full attention.

Part of Harry froze, remembering what happened when Uncle Vernon did that. But he forced it away, and reminded himself with a deep breath that this was the Malfoys, not the Dursleys. And Healer Letham had reminded him that if he wanted to get them to agree with him, he couldn’t treat them like they were evil or monsters.

“Because I think we would both be happier that way,” Harry said. “Dobby is really miserable, and I’m miserable because he’s miserable.”

“Dobby!” Mr. Malfoy called, without taking his eyes away from Harry’s face.

Dobby appeared, but immediately flung himself on the floor and lay there like a tossed-aside doll. Harry swallowed and didn’t say the angry things he wanted to say. They wouldn’t help. Sulking in his room for days hadn’t helped. He needed to do this for Dobby, not himself, the way Healer Letham had said.

“What have you been telling Henry?” Mr. Malfoy demanded.

Dobby started to tremble, but Harry intervened before he could say anything. “He isn’t to blame. I am. I asked him what the elf quarters were like, and he said they were cold and dark. And he said that you punish him by making him shut his ears and fingers in things. That—that reminds me of what I endured with the Muggles.” He ignored Mrs. Malfoy’s sharp gasp and the way Draco leaned against him for a minute, just staring at Mr. Malfoy. If he had to use this to get sympathy, then he would. It was less important than getting help for Dobby. “So I thought, if he served me, then he could be happy, and I would be happier.”

Mr. Malfoy, oddly, had something like a smile lingering around his lips. “You are trying to make this a bargain, Henry?”

Harry twitched. He hadn’t thought of it like that. And it made sense that Mr. Malfoy would be happy if he was. It was probably a sign that Harry was acting like a pureblood, or a Slytherin, or something.

But in the end, Harry swallowed and stared straight at Mr. Malfoy and said, “If I can.”

“One thing concerns me,” Mr. Malfoy said, his hand lingering for a second on the edge of the table before he glanced at Dobby. “If you feel sorry for all our elves, then will you demand that _all_ of them be assigned to you? That is unsustainable.”

“No.” Harry folded his arms. “But you could cast some spells to make the quarters light and warm, couldn’t you? And you don’t have to order them to not shut their ears and fingers in the doors and things like that. They could serve you better if they weren’t in pain all the time. If they were happy.”

Mr. Malfoy stared at him. “We keep the quarters dark and cold because the elves like it that way.”

“Yes, Henry,” Draco added, squirming around on his chair as if he wanted to try and bring himself into Harry’s line of sight and break the staring contest he was having with Mr. Malfoy. “House-elves are just—different from us. They enjoy the dark because it lets them sleep better. And they like the cold because they have lower blood circulation than we do.”

Harry stared at him for a second, then at Dobby. Dobby had lifted his head and was looking at Harry with his tears once again quivering in the corners of his eyes.

“Dobby? Is that true? Do the other elves like the sleeping quarters?”

Dobby took a long, deep breath, and then he looked down and whispered, “No, Great Master Harry Potter. They not be liking it.”

“Do _not_ call him that!”

Mr. Malfoy’s voice flicked like a whip, and Dobby wailed and buried his face in the carpet again. Harry glared at Mr. Malfoy. “I _asked_ him to call me that. If you want to get angry at someone, get angry at me.”

“Have we made so unsuitable a home for you?” Mrs. Malfoy asked, and her voice was so pleading Harry glanced at her. She was holding a hand out to him, and her voice was soft and upset. Harry gulped. He didn’t even like seeing Aunt Petunia upset. He hated it more when it was his mother.

Except that it was still hard to feel like she was his mother, and Harry used that to push back the impulse to just immediately give in.

“No,” he whispered. “But I’m not _used_ to it, and I know that you kept the house-elves away from me, and you punish them like the Dursleys punished me. Is it really so strange that I sympathize with them? That I want to keep them from being hurt?”

“That is not strange,” said Mr. Malfoy, his voice sounding a little strangled. “But when you ask to be called by that name, it makes us wonder if you wish to go back to them.”

“No!” Harry glared at him. “But at the time, I didn’t feel much like Henry Malfoy. And you still—you could do _so much_ with magic, so easily. You could make the elf quarters better. You could cook your own food. You could clean up spilled tea. Why don’t you do it? Why do you abuse the elves and make them punish themselves?”

“They _do_ like the dark and the cold,” Draco insisted. “That’s the way it is.”

“You just heard Dobby say they didn’t!”

Draco folded his arms and gave him a stubborn glare that Harry was sure echoed the one on his own face. “Well, we didn’t know.”

“Now, you do. So _fix_ it.”

“Boys,” said Mr. Malfoy sternly. Harry turned back to him, while Draco gave a little huff and glared at his plate.

“I am not averse to making a bargain,” Mr. Malfoy said. “So. You want us to improve the elf quarters?”

Harry hesitated. This sounded like a trap. Then again, he reminded himself, quietly, that the Malfoys were not the Dursleys, and Mr. Malfoy wasn’t Dudley making what sounded like a good bargain so Harry wouldn’t get bullied, then coming back to bully him anyway.

“Yes. But I want to look at them and make sure that you actually did something good.”

Mr. Malfoy nodded. “In return, what do we get?”

Harry hesitated, rapping his fingers on the side of the table. He hated this. He wasn’t good at this. Yes, Healer Letham had suggested that he make bargains with the Malfoys if he could, but he hadn’t thought it would be this literal. He’d just thought it would be acting happier once he had Dobby as his personal elf, which wouldn’t have been difficult.

“I act happier?” he asked. He hated that it sounded like a question, but it was.

“You act happier, or you _are_ happier?” Mr. Malfoy countered swiftly.

Harry scowled at him. He wasn’t as smart as they were. He wasn’t a Slytherin. He hadn’t grown up like this.

“I’ll try to be happier,” he said. “I _will_ be happier that you aren’t abusing them anymore. But I can’t promise that I’ll be happy in exactly the way you want me to. I’m not a Slytherin. I don’t turn my emotions on and off like that.”

“Fair enough.” Mr. Malfoy nodded and then glanced to the side. Harry looked around, wondering if another elf had appeared.

But Mrs. Malfoy was still sitting there, and she straightened her shoulders and said, “We can stop scolding the elves when they make a mistake.”

“What about not telling them to punish themselves?”

“Is that rather what you would want instead?”

“Why not both of them at once?” Harry clenched his fists, but he did it under the table, although from the way Mrs. Malfoy focused on him, she might have noticed. “Why are you _bargaining_ with me like this?”

Mrs. Malfoy sighed. “Because we have overrun the boundaries, I think. We have assumed that you would be exactly like the son we lost—our _stories_ of the son we lost. You are not.” Harry eyed her suspiciously and wondered if she’d been talking to Healer Letham. “And you are assuming that we would be more like your Muggle captors. Neither assumption has worked. I think it would be more productive to lay out these boundaries and discuss them as bargains we’re making, artificial as it seems. It ensures that we know where we stand, and what barriers are still in the way.”

Harry nodded. All right, he understood that. And he would rather that they not go around telling lies to him about Dobby and evil plots in Hogwarts again. He turned to Dobby. “Dobby, if you had to pick, would you rather avoid being scolded or being told to punish yourself?”

Dobby lifted his head and let his eyes dart back and forth between Harry and the adults before he dropped his head again. But his voice was still audible. “Dobby and the other elves does not wants to punish themselveses. It hurts.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Malfoy. “I ask that you continue your sessions with Healer Letham in return.”

“But I thought you would make me do that anyway.”

“I do not want to _make_ you do anything,” Mrs. Malfoy said, so passionately that Harry stared at her. “I want you to be part of our family, Henry. I want to help you recover. I want to bring you home.”

“I’m here.”

“But only in body, not in mind or spirit. If we can have you here, then all other sacrifices are worth it and we will learn a new way.”

Harry bit back the words that said they shouldn’t have been abusing their house-elves anyway, if they were good people. That would just start another argument that he didn’t want to start at the moment. “All right. You don’t order the house-elves to punish themselves anymore, and I’ll continue the sessions with Healer Letham.”

“Done.” Mrs. Malfoy smiled at him in relief so radiant that Harry had to look down and fiddle with his silverware for a second.

“And what do _I_ get?” Draco asked, sounding exactly as petulant as he had when complaining about all the things his father would hear about.

“Draco,” Mr. Malfoy began, his voice stern.

“No, wait,” Harry said, and turned to Draco. His brother still looked like he had something shoved up his bum, but he had looked that way so often that it wasn’t anything new. “I want to bargain so the house-elves don’t get scolded anymore.”

“Yes.” Draco nodded as if he was perfectly happy to agree to that, although Harry wondered how many times he had screamed at the house-elves in private. Then again, Harry had never seen the Malfoys interact with any elf but Dobby, so he didn’t know. “And in return, you stop telling them to call you Harry.”

Harry shrugged. “All right.”

Draco squinted at him. “Just like that?”

“It’s a small price to pay to make sure that the elves are safe.”

Draco looked as if he had swallowed a lemon. Harry grinned at him. He knew why. Draco probably thought that was the most Gryffindor sentiment he’d ever heard.

“I mean,” Draco went on in a dogged way, “it must matter a lot to you if you told them to call you that. And now you’re giving it up. Just like that?”

Harry sighed noisily and ran his hand down his face. His parents were watching him across the table. He tried again to think of them that way, his parents, before he looked at his brother.

“I was Harry Potter for twelve years,” he said. “It was hard to give that up, sure. And I was only _sometimes_ Henry Malfoy at school, you know? Around you, and around the professors who called me Mr. Malfoy. My friends all called me Harry. I just—when I want to feel more like the person I thought I was, I think of myself as Harry. It’s _hard_ to give your whole identity up and hear that you were someone else. What would you do if you found out that you were actually a Weasley?”

“But I’m _not_!”

“But what if you were?”

“But I’m not!” Draco turned to Mrs. Malfoy. “Mum, tell him I’m not a Weasley.”

“I believe that Henry is making a special point known as a hypothetical,” Mrs. Malfoy murmured, so dryly that Harry gaped at her. She didn’t speak like that to _him_

_Because we’re different. And she knows that._

It was such an unexpected thought that Harry swallowed a gasp, and noticed Mr. Malfoy studying him for a second. But Harry only shook his head, and Mr. Malfoy went back to looking at Mrs. Malfoy and Draco, who was insisting in a low voice that he wasn’t a Weasley and getting it explained to him that Harry hadn’t thought he was a Malfoy, either.

 _Maybe they’re not exactly good people,_ Harry thought as he studied the Malfoys. _Maybe it would be better if they changed on their own instead of me having to bargain with them for it. But they do want to treat me right. They’re not as awful as I thought, either._

That thought left him oddly able to breathe again, and when Draco finally got over his snit and glanced at him, Harry nodded at him. “So you don’t scold the elves anymore, and I tell them to call me Henry. Deal?”

“Deal,” Draco said fervently. “And also, you come and fly with me this afternoon.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “You don’t need to bargain with me for that.”

Draco’s mouth actually dropped open, and Harry blinked again. Draco had really thought he wouldn’t get what he wanted unless he asked for it as part of a deal.

“You’re _such_ an idiot,” Harry said in awe.

“Henry! Do not call your brother an idiot.”

Harry put up with the scolding from Mrs. Malfoy, while he watched Draco from the corner of one eye and Dobby from the corner of another. Dobby had lifted his head from the carpet and was watching cautiously, although he ducked back whenever he apparently thought the Malfoys were glancing at him, too. But he gave a huge watery smile when he caught Harry’s eye.

Harry didn’t think it was fixing everything that had gone wrong. But it was a start.

*

“Father is acting strange,” Draco complained out of the corner of his mouth as they soared on their Nimbuses across the Quidditch pitch at the back of the gardens. It was probably the part of Malfoy Manor that Harry liked best, huge and green and surrounded with low trees and shrubs that were there to make more hiding places for the Snitch.

Harry just nodded. Mr. Malfoy had come out to watch them fly, which Draco said he didn’t do all the time. He was sitting in a conjured chair on the far side of the pitch, a glass of water on the arm of the chair and a stack of parchment in his lap. Apparently he answered letters from the Ministry on a regular basis and offered them “advice.”

 _Advice on evil,_ Harry had thought, from force of habit, but he didn’t know that for certain. And Mr. Malfoy had said they were trying to shift away from Voldemort.

For him.

It was a strange thought, and Harry got rid of it by pulling himself back in a flip that turned him head over broom bristles and made Draco yelp. Mr. Malfoy was also standing up, when Harry started flying forwards again and saw him, but Harry waved to him and he sat down, his face watchful.

“You’re mad,” Draco muttered to him, shoving at him with one hand.

It hadn’t been hard enough to knock him off his broom or anything like it, so Harry avoided it easily and snorted at him. “Draco, do not call your brother mad,” he intoned.

“You aren’t going to tell Mother, are you?”

“No. I’m making a special point called making fun of you, you git.”

Draco shoved him again for that, and then Harry pulled away and dived towards the ground. Draco chased him, laughing so hard that he sounded a lot younger than he was.

 _Than we are._ Having Draco as a twin wasn’t the strangest part of the whole “being a Malfoy” thing for Harry, but it was still sometimes something that showed up in the corner of his mind and made him jump when he thought about it.

Harry pulled up out of the dive, and Draco followed, and then they were looping in and out among the trees and over the sides of the pitch and back. Draco kept laughing, and Harry glanced over his shoulder and grinned. This way, Draco was just a regular kid, one who was happy to be having fun with his brother.

And Harry was happy, too.

He dived again, and threw himself to the side so that he was skimming sideways above the grass. Draco flew overhead, shrieking about how Harry was mad and he would say that in front of Mother and he didn’t _care._

Harry twisted out of the dive in time, and glanced to the side.

There was a huge black dog sitting on the edge of the pitch, staring up at him with eyes that seemed to shine unnaturally even from this far away.

Harry found himself shivering, even though the dog wasn’t doing anything threatening. Draco hovered beside him and stared around. “What is it? What are you—”

Then he saw the dog, and shrieked. “ _Father_! It’s a Grim!”

Mr. Malfoy was immediately moving across the pitch, his wand snapping out. The spell he cast was a long one like a chain of blue lightning that Harry didn’t know, but luckily, it missed the dog, which hopped back and then turned and ran across the gardens. Harry flew down and towards Mr. Malfoy, landing in front of him and shaking as if he was scared, so that Mr. Malfoy couldn’t fire any more spells after Black.

“What’s a Grim?” he whispered, leaning against Mr. Malfoy for a second. Mr. Malfoy wrapped a protective arm around him. “Why was it here?”

“They’re magical dogs that some think of as death omens.” Mr. Malfoy’s voice was calm and reassuring. “I have never found any sign that they actually are, however.” He twisted a little and looked around as though waiting for something, and then Draco came running over. Mr. Malfoy embraced him, too, sighing.

“However,” Mr. Malfoy went on, “one of them should not have been able to cross the wards. I am going to strengthen them. And—I am afraid that I have bad news, Henry. It hasn’t been announced publicly, because the Ministry was hoping to capture him without causing a panic, but it will have to be tomorrow.”

“What?” Draco breathed the word. Harry found his breath stuck in his throat.

“Sirius Black has escaped from Azkaban.” Mr. Malfoy hugged Harry tighter, and probably did the same to Draco, too, but Harry couldn’t look up to see. “He has not been seen anywhere near the Ministry. They think his more likely goal, given all the newspaper articles about Harry Potter being discovered to be Henry Malfoy, is to find you. Perhaps to kidnap you again. We will be taking every precaution with your safety, Henry, be assured of that. But Black is still dangerous.”

Harry felt as though someone had stabbed him with a cold knife, even though he’d known perfectly well that Sirius Black was out of Azkaban. He cuddled closer to his father—he was his father, Harry wanted more now to get used to thinking of him that way—and glanced over his shoulder. He didn’t see a sign of the dog, the Grim. He hoped that that meant he was out of the gardens, and that Mr. Malfoy’s strengthening of the wards would mean Black couldn’t sneak back in.

Harry didn’t want Black to be hurt or killed. He didn’t even think that he wanted him to go back to Azkaban. From what Draco had told him about the Dementors, they sounded pretty awful.

But he also didn’t want to be kidnapped again. He probably would even have told the Malfoys about meeting Black before, except…

Things were so nice right now. He didn’t want them to get upset again.

From the way Mr. Malfoy kept his arm around both of them as he led them back to the house, Harry didn’t even think it was that bad. It wasn’t like there would be a chance for Sirius Black to get so close again.


	4. Chapter 4

“Isn’t this a bit extreme?”

“No.” Mrs. Malfoy fussed for a long moment before she clasped the silver bracelet around Harry’s wrist and stepped back with a nod. “There. That will disable most Portkeys, and make it impossible for someone to Apparate with you while you wear it unless they wear the complementary bracelet.” She held up her own wrist. “I want you to promise me that you won’t take it off, Henry.”

“Fine. But—I’m just going into the next room to meet Healer Letham.”

“I know. But I _won’t_ let you be taken again.”

Harry swallowed uneasily. Mrs. Malfoy actually looked a little scary when she said that. He imagined what she would do to Sirius Black if the man tried to kidnap him again, and shivered.

Mrs. Malfoy smoothed back his hair and kissed the scar on his forehead. She seemed to like doing that, and Harry still hadn’t decided how he felt about it. “Now, be a good boy and come find me when you’re done with the healing session. We’re going to go to Diagon Alley today, just you and I.”

“All right,” Harry said, a bit intrigued. He had never gone shopping with someone alone to buy things for himself, except for Hagrid before his first year. Going with Aunt Petunia and being made to carry most of the shopping didn’t count.

He turned and walked into the grey room, only to find Healer Letham having a conversation with Dobby. Harry blinked and sat on the grey chair where he had last time. “I didn’t know that you two knew each other,” he said, and then could have smacked himself for how stupid that sounded.

But Healer Letham only smiled at him as if she didn’t find it stupid. “Good morning, Henry. Your elf was just introducing me and asking if I needed lemonade. He brought me some.” She held up the glass of lemonade.

“Oh. Thank you, Dobby,” Harry said, surprised to find that the elf was handing him a mug of hot chocolate. He didn’t even know how Dobby knew he liked that, unless he’d been spying on him at Hogwarts.

Dobby burst into tears of happiness, and it took Harry a while to soothe him and get him to leave. When he looked up, he found that Healer Letham’s smile was fainter but there.

“Did it work out like you wanted, asking for Dobby to be your personal elf?” Healer Letham asked, and finished her lemonade with another sip.

“I think so.” Harry tucked his feet under him, since Healer Letham didn’t seem to mind and it wasn’t like he was wearing trainers. Mrs. Malfoy had made him get rid of all his Muggle clothes when he was at Malfoy Manor for Christmas, except for a few pairs of pants and the like that Harry had hidden in the bottom of his trunk. It wasn’t like he _liked_ wearing Dudley’s castoffs, but they were _his_. “They said in return that I should try to be happier and I have to let the elves call me Henry Malfoy. Oh, and I have to attend sessions with you.”

Healer Letham frowned. “I do not like that they made your attendance at these sessions a compromise.”

Harry shrugged at her. “They promised that they’d improve the house-elf quarters and they’d stop yelling at them and telling them to punish themselves. It was worth it.”

Healer Letham kept frowning. “And do you think it _cost_ them as much as it cost you to give up what you did?”

“If it’s about cost, then I don’t think it cost me a lot, either. I _can_ act happier now that Dobby is my elf. I wanted to come talk to you again, anyway. And they can call me Henry Malfoy all they want. It’s not my name if I don’t think of myself that way.”

“An interesting perspective.” Healer Letham tucked her feet like she had the other day and he was doing now, and Harry grinned. “We did not talk about the matter of your name the other day.”

Harry sighed. “No. Look—it’s a compromise, the best one I think I’m going to get. I can understand why they don’t want to call me Harry. It’s always going to remind them of the Potters.”

“But?”

“I think of myself as Harry. Not always as Harry _Potter_ , now, but Harry. And I’m never going to call myself Aldebaran. That’s ridiculous.”

“Is Henry actively unpleasant to you?”

“Not really? It’s just sort of there. Like some slime I can’t rub off.”

“That sounds actively unpleasant to me.”

Healer Letham’s voice had got cool again. Harry sighed and rubbed his head across his brow, and his scar, and his eyes that no longer needed glasses. “This is the only thing I don’t like about coming to talk to you. I’m not _good_ at this. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Explain what?”

“How I feel.” Harry peered at her around his hand, to see if she was joking, because he didn’t think she’d been this stupid the last time. But the intense way Healer Letham stared at him said that she wanted to hear more about it, so Harry obliged. Grumpily. “It’s there, and I don’t like it, but it’s _just_ there, you know? Not bothering me from day to day. It’s like living with my cousin and my uncle and aunt when they weren’t bullying me or punishing me. I mean, the people I thought were my cousin and uncle and aunt. I don’t _like_ it, but I can endure it.”

“You should speak to the Malfoys about your name if it bothers you that much.”

“But like I said, I also understand why they don’t want to call me Harry. And I can’t come up with another name I like, anyway.”

“Perhaps you could suggest the name of another star?”

Harry stared at her, appalled. “Do you _want_ me to be called something like Famolhaut?”

“Famolhaut?” Healer Letham said it with the kind of delicacy that Harry knew meant she was trying not to burst out laughing.

“Mrs. Malfoy said that she thought of that name before she picked Aldebaran. She has _terrible_ taste in names. Just terrible. She shouldn’t be allowed to name children.”

Healer Letham did snort this time, but she shook her head a second later. “I think that we should still talk about names, even if you don’t want the Malfoys to go back to calling you Harry. You find your mother’s taste in names terrible. And you call her Mrs. Malfoy.”

Harry swallowed and looked down with a nod. “Yeah. I’ve tried to get more comfortable calling her Mother, but it’s _hard._ Draco does it so naturally. And I look at her and I see a mother sometimes, but sometimes I see a woman who hates Muggles, and would have hated me if I didn’t turn out to be her son.”

“What could she do to get you to trust her more?”

Harry eyed her. “She said something the other day that made me think she’d talked to you. She _is_ talking to you, isn’t she? Do you go and tell her everything that I’ve said?” Harry shuddered a little. He could only imagine the earful he would get if Mrs. Malfoy heard that he thought she was terrible at picking out names.

“I will not tell her what you have said in these sessions,” Healer Letham promised. “And I am only working with her in my capacity as _your_ Healer. I am trying to make sure that she knows being the mother of a traumatized child is not the same as being the mother of the visionary child she hoped and dreamed about.”

Harry slumped in his chair. “Because I’m such a disappointment.”

“Not that at all. Simply, as I said, that she had mythologized how rescuing you would go. You would appear, and it would be as if the years had never passed at all and she would have the child she had dreamed of back. That is simply not the case, and she is beginning to accept it, Harry.”

Harry studied her from under his fringe. “ _You_ don’t hesitate to call me that name.”

“Of course not, but I don’t have the associations that the Malfoys do with it.” Healer Letham shifted so another foot was dangling down near the floor again. “Now, think on the questions I’ve asked you for a few minutes. Is there anything Mrs. Malfoy could do that would make you more comfortable accepting her as your mother? And do you think you would prefer a name other than Henry?”

Harry opened his mouth to object about it, but Healer Letham said, “I don’t think a few minutes have passed,” and he shut his mouth again and sat back in the chair, thinking.

Mrs. Malfoy tried her best to act as a mother, he thought. She was _trying._ He didn’t know what else she could try.

And he meant what he had said about the name. It was just _there_ , and he would get used to it as more people called him that. In school he had sometimes felt like a Henry when he was reading the letters that the Malfoys sent him. Since he’d been home, he’d felt more like a Harry, simply because he didn’t fit in with what the Malfoys expected of him.

He glanced up and shook his head.

Healer Letham didn’t look upset, although Harry had braced himself for her disappointment. “Well, think on it. And I’m sure that if you did choose a name other than Henry that wasn’t Harry, and you liked it enough to be going on with, then you could get the Malfoys to use it, as well.”

Harry just nodded, although he was thinking that he would probably always be a Harry, and that was just the way it was. “Yes, Healer.”

*

“Those robes look marvelous on you.”

Harry fidgeted as Mrs. Malfoy looked at him with a beaming smile on her face. He was glad that she was so happy, but honestly, over _robes?_

And they did _not_ look marvelous on him. They were like the robes that the Malfoys had filled his cupboard with since he came to the Manor for the summer, all tight and uncomfortable and formal. And they all had silver on them somewhere, like silver trim, or they were just made of silver cloth. Harry didn’t know why the Malfoys were obsessed with silver, but he didn’t like it.

Mrs. Malfoy stepped in front of him, and abruptly stopped smiling. Harry looked at her warily. They were in the middle of a wizarding tailor’s called The Right Fit, and behind her was a huge expanse of red and green and blue silk formal robes that Harry hoped he never had to wear. They looked like he would trip over them if he took a step.

“Oh, Henry.” Mrs. Malfoy reached out to cup his cheek, and Harry found himself leaning into her hand without thinking about it. He did like spending time alone with her. He just didn’t like the way they were spending it. “You’re unhappy. What is it? The robes? The color?”

“Both,” Harry said, and ducked his head a little when he saw how stricken she looked. He didn’t _like_ causing his mother pain like that. He didn’t like causing _anyone_ pain. “I just—they’re too tight, and I don’t like them, and I think they wash me out.”

“On that last, you’re wrong,” Mrs. Malfoy responded gently. “They go with your coloration. Draco wears robes like that all the time.”

“And we’re identical twins, so what looks good on him has to look good on me. I know.” Harry sighed. “Forget I said anything.”

“No, I will not.” Mrs. Malfoy’s voice was quiet. “I want to know what _you_ would like, Henry. What can I do for you? What kind of robes you would prefer to buy?”

Harry swallowed. She sounded like she meant it. And she wasn’t Aunt Petunia, who would pretend sometimes when he was really little that she was going to buy something just for Harry and then laugh at him for believing her.

_No. Mrs. Malfoy just abuses house-elves._

Harry put aside those thoughts for a second, because he didn’t think they would help. He took a deep breath and said, “Just casual robes, like the ones that we wear at school. Can we do that? I don’t really care _that_ much about the color, as long as they don’t have silver or gold everywhere. It—it makes me feel like I’m galloping around being royal or something. I hate it.”

“Malfoys are not royal, but we do have the money to buy you anything that you want, Henry. You have only to ask.”

“School robes and casual robes are different things,” added the tailor, Farthingale, abruptly appearing around a corner. He was a tall man with white hair and golden eyes who probably would have made a good Malfoy, Harry thought. “But we can certainly introduce the young master to a selection of casual robes, if that would work for both of you, Mrs. Malfoy.”

“It works very well for me.” Mrs. Malfoy’s voice was quiet. “What about for you, Henry?”

Harry nodded hesitantly a second later. It seemed that he might get rid of the horrible silver robes after all, and look more like a normal person. Even if nothing about his life had ever been or would ever be normal.

At least his clothes would be.

And the way Mrs. Malfoy smiled when she saw _him_ smiling outdid all the beaming looks that she’d ever given him before.

*

“Is there anywhere else that you would like to go while we’re here on the Alley, Henry?”

Harry glanced around curiously as they came out of The Right Fit, with the huge collection of casual robes, in red and black and blue, that Mrs. Malfoy had bought shrunken and tucked in her pocket. He hadn’t seen much of this part of Diagon Alley, which was a sort of back street behind Gringotts. There were bookshops and broom shops and shops with magical toys in them.

“Can we just sort of wander around and look?”

“Of course.” Mrs. Malfoy smiled at him again. “I am more than happy to do that with my son.” She held out her hand.

“You don’t need to do that,” Harry muttered, even as he took it. “I’m thirteen, not three.”

“I was not there when you were three.”

Harry winced a little, and fell silent as they walked past a few shops that didn’t look interesting, selling what seemed to be more clothes and shoes and food that looked like it would melt if Harry breathed on it wrong. They halted in front of one of the bookshops, and Mrs. Malfoy glanced at him curiously.

Harry took a deep breath and faced her. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Not being there when I was three.”

Mrs. Malfoy slowly shook her head. For a second, to Harry’s horror, tears glittered in her eyes, but luckily, they didn’t actually fall. “We should have had stronger wards. We should have had bracelets like the one you’re wearing now.” She nodded towards the silver bracelet Harry had almost forgotten about. It really was that light. “We should have known Sirius would be a security risk and we couldn’t invite him over just because he was _family._ I’m so sorry, Henry.”

Harry cleared his throat. “Still not your fault.”

“It was. And you will be safe, now, darling. I will do everything in the world to keep you safe.”

Harry looked away with his ears burning. He thought that at least a few people on the street were gaping at them, although how they knew the difference between Draco and the boy who used to be Harry Potter walking around with a Malfoy he wasn’t certain. “I’d like to go in here,” he said, and ducked into the bookshop.

Anything to get away from the sight of his mother nearly crying.

*

The bookshop actually did turn out to be a worthwhile distraction, though. Harry found all sorts of wizarding children’s books there that he’d never realized existed (and Mrs. Malfoy said something about him not growing up reading them or hearing them read to him, which meant she was willing to buy him as many as he wanted). There were also books on the history of Quidditch a lot longer than _Quidditch Through the Ages,_ and a novel about a daring and brave Quidditch player who solved mysteries that looked interesting. And a book on famous Parselmouths that Mrs. Malfoy bought before Harry could even ask for it.

He did hope that the book wasn’t all about Salazar Slytherin and Voldemort, but from the length of it, it couldn’t be. And Harry got the chance to flip through it as they stood in the queue, and saw, to his satisfaction, lots of different names in the table of contents.

Even if he couldn’t pronounce all of them.

They stepped outside the bookshop and Mrs. Malfoy shrank the books, too, and asked Harry if he wanted an ice. Harry nodded at once, but then something caught his eye, and he turned his head.

A black dog crouched on the other side of the alley, watching him.

Harry swallowed and deliberately turned away from the dog. He wasn’t going to call Mrs. Malfoy’s attention to it. So far, it seemed no one had mistaken Black for a Grim, anyway. People just went on about their business and ignored the half-starving dog huddled on the ground.

Harry wondered for a fleeting instant if he should do something about that—Black shouldn’t be starving—but then he put the notion away. It was really too much to ask that he take care of the man who’d kidnapped him.

If Mr. Malfoy hadn’t told Mrs. Malfoy about the Grim, he would have tried to buy something at one of the food shops and drop scraps for the dog. But Harry had been there when he warned her.

“Let’s go have an ice,” he said, when he noticed Mrs. Malfoy’s eyes trained on him, probably noticing his distraction.

She nodded to him and walked with him up the alley in the direction of Florean Fortescue’s. Harry trotted along at her side and held her hand, which for once he didn’t mind. Even though he was sure that even Sirius Black wouldn’t be mad enough to snatch him off Diagon Alley in broad daylight.

Then there came a rush from behind him, and apparently he was wrong about that.

People screamed as Black snatched Harry away from Mrs. Malfoy, his arms wrapping around Harry’s chest. Harry gasped and caught his breath. Black’s hold was so tight it was _hurting_ him. Black spun away as if trying to hide from the curses or the Dementors that might be coming after him.

But a strange bumping sensation went through Harry, and Black snarled in a voice that was almost a dog’s voice, “What’s the hold-up?”

 _The bracelet._ Mrs. Malfoy had said that no one could Apparate with Harry while he was wearing it unless they wore the complementary one. Black must have tried to Apparate with him, and been stopped by the bracelet.

Harry squirmed, got his legs under him, and kicked backwards as hard as he could. Black let out a loud pained sound and dropped him. Harry rolled to his feet and drew his wand. He didn’t care if he got in trouble for using magic during the summer, he wasn’t going to let Black take off with him again.

Sympathy only went so far.

“Sirius Black.”

Harry shivered. The air around them actually got colder and darker, at least he thought it did, and he turned around. He wondered if someone had already called for the Dementors and they were filling the alley.

But no, it was Mrs. Malfoy, standing with her wand drawn and—

Harry recoiled. There was a look of almost insane hatred in her eyes. Her blonde hair, as fair as his own, was floating around her from the power of the magic that was flaring out from her wand.

“Cissy.” Black’s voice was raspy. He did a ridiculous little bow and edged back as if he was trying to get hold of Harry again. Harry edged the other way. Black stopped and stared at him for a second, then back at Mrs. Malfoy. “Sorry not to have time to talk, but I’m trying to protect _James’s_ legacy.”

 _That’s why he wants to kidnap me._ Harry was suddenly sure. Maybe Black was a Death Eater who had betrayed the Potters, but the real reason he wanted to go after Harry now was to make him be a Potter again. That had to be it.

“You will not.” Mrs. Malfoy was using the scary voice again. She gestured with her wand. Harry ducked as the spell flew past him, but from what he felt, it never really had a chance of touching it.

It _did_ touch Black.

Who _screamed._

Harry whipped around, and stared as a huge panel of skin just… _peeled_ off the front of Black’s chest and fell to the ground. He curled around the wound, still screaming, and Harry saw black tendrils coming out of it, grabbing other places on Black’s chest and tugging. It looked as if he was being eaten alive by some plant growing out of the middle of his body.

Mrs. Malfoy laughed softly. Harry looked back at her, and she still had the insane look on her face. She stalked towards them, and stopped, staring at Black.

“That is what you get,” she said. “For trying to take my child again.” Her eyes focused on Harry, and she reached out a hand. “Come here, Henry.”

Harry couldn’t help it. He flinched and shrank back. She had used a spell like that on Black, and now she wanted Harry to just walk up to her?

Mrs. Malfoy stared at him. “Henry, what’s wrong?”

It was as if some invisible barrier had dropped away from Harry’s ears, and now he could hear other people shouting and screaming and being sick and calling for the Aurors. He glanced back at Black, and caught his eye just as Black spun on the spot and vanished with a crack.

The man still looked crazed, and mouthed “ _James_ ” at him before he went.

“You tortured him,” Harry said, and he sounded like the three-year-old she’d been talking about earlier, and he couldn’t _help_ it. “You hurt him really bad.”

“He would have taken you. He did take you, once. I am going to hurt my cousin as much as I can.”

“But he didn’t take me this time.”

Harry swallowed for air, struggling to think. He didn’t want to touch her. She had—she had _tortured_ Black. He couldn’t even think of his mother doing that. Not the kind mother he used to imagine when he didn’t believe the Dursleys’ lies. Not the stupid drunken mother he used to imagine when he did. Not Lily Potter as he’d imagined her.

“We must leave,” Mrs. Malfoy said crisply. “The Aurors will wish to talk to us, but they can do that at the Manor.”

She grabbed his hand and Apparated. Harry went with her, because he had no choice, but his pulse was hammering in his ears.

He felt as if he was going to be sick, and as if something else had broken and fallen to pieces around him, the way it had when he’d seen Dobby.

_It was wrong._


	5. Chapter 5

“No.”

“Yes.”

“ _No_ ,” Harry said, and shut the bathroom door hard while Draco was distracted by their admittedly childish argument. “You are _not_ following me when I go to the loo. I don’t care what they told you. No one is going to kidnap me here.”

“They thought that no one was going to kidnap you in Diagon Alley, either.” At least Draco only leaned heavily against the door instead of trying to break it down or something. “Mother almost lost her mind.”

“I watched her lose it,” Harry muttered darkly, and then leaned towards the door and spoke as clearly as he could. “And if you think you’re going to listen to me piss, _you aren’t._ Go _away._ ”

“We want to make sure that you’re safe.”

Harry held back the temptation to bang his head on the door instead of whisper to it, and turned to the loo. At least he thought the spells on the door that meant he had privacy when he was in here and Dobby was cleaning his room would probably keep Draco from hearing anything that he was doing, too.

Harry’s hands shook a little as he pissed and then washed his hands and brushed his teeth. He caught sight of his own grey eyes in the mirror, and had to look away, because all he could think of was the moment when Mrs. Malfoy’s had burned with hatred.

She had tried to explain, once they got back to Malfoy Manor. She had said the thought of someone taking Harry away again made her like that, and also there was something called the Black madness that ran in the family and probably was one of the reasons that Sirius had acted the way he had.

But Harry had said that she didn’t need to _torture_ Black. And Mrs. Malfoy had taken him into her arms and whispered, “Yes, I did. It was all I could do to keep from killing him, but if I had cast the Killing Curse, I would have gone to Azkaban.”

That only made things worse, as far as Harry was concerned. It meant that she _could_ control herself, but for whatever reason, she’d decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. That not showing those torture spells to Harry wasn’t worth the effort.

The Aurors had come and questioned both Mrs. Malfoy and Harry, but nothing had come of it. It turned out that the spell Mrs. Malfoy had used wasn’t actually illegal, unlike something called the Cruciatus Curse. She could basically do whatever she wanted as long as she didn’t actually use those illegal spells.

Harry had tried to speak up about how silly that was, but the Aurors had literally patted his head and obviously considered him a traumatized, silly child who was still too shaken up to give sensible testimony. And then they had left, and the _real_ horror had begun.

No one wanted to let Harry out of their sight. He hadn’t had a session with Healer Letham since this happened, because those were supposed to be private. He did homework in the same room as Mr. Malfoy, who always kept his wand out. He went on walks in the gardens with Mrs. Malfoy, and someone always watched him if he flew. Draco had shown up with a second bed in Harry’s bedroom, _without even asking_ , and just had the house-elves set it up.

Now he wanted to follow Harry into the bathroom.

The more Harry thought about it, the more indignant he got. He raked his hair back behind his ears and then stormed over to the bathroom door and threw it open. Draco stumbled, but didn’t fall. It seemed he had been leaning on the frame instead of the door itself.

“I can’t _stand_ this,” Harry snapped at him.

“Stand what?” But then Draco proved he was smarter than Harry used to think he was, because he stood up straight and gave Harry a deeply injured look. “You know that we’re worried about you. You know that we’re just trying to keep you safe.”

“I know, but I _didn’t_ get kidnapped! You weren’t even this bad right after I got found.” Harry stalked past Draco into the room and threw himself on his own bed. Draco came over and sat on his, watching Harry narrowly.

“I hate it when you’re this overprotective,” Harry whispered, shutting his eyes.

“Well, we have to be.” Draco sounded offended. “Henry, Black can somehow come _onto the grounds._ We don’t even know how he’s doing it.”

Harry opened one eye. “I thought it was because he was an Animagus? Or because he’s a Grim Animagus.” Now that Mrs. Malfoy had seen Black transform from a black dog, Harry didn’t have to pretend that he doesn’t know about that anymore.

Draco shook his head. “There are wards that should have kept Animagi out. And I think he’s just a dog, not a Grim. He _looks_ a lot like a Grim, that’s all.” Draco swallowed with visible nervousness. “And he—and he wants, what? I thought he wanted to kill you, but that bit about James’s legacy says he doesn’t.”

“I think he wants to take me back and make me be a Potter again.”

Draco sat up so rapidly he almost fell off the bed. “I didn’t even think about that!” he exclaimed, and leaped to his feet and started pacing back and forth. “Shit. What if that means that he’s going to Memory Charm you to forget you’re a Malfoy and reinstate the glamours? Then you wouldn’t even _know_ you used to be part of our family!”

“Do you think that’s worse than me being killed?” Harry asked, a little entertained at the way Draco was phrasing it.

That entertainment ended when Draco turned around. His face was grim and pale, and he came around the foot of their beds and squeezed Harry’s hand.

“Not _worse_ ,” he said. “But it’s terrible that we lost you. It would be terrible if we lost you again just as we found you, and if Black managed to convince you that you were really Harry Potter, so that you didn’t even want to come back.” Draco abruptly bit his lip, and looked for a second the way he had when Ron had accidentally let it slip that Harry was abused. “I don’t want to lose you, Henry.”

Harry was terrible at this. He’d never had a brother. But he did manage to wrap an arm around Draco and hold him for a second, before he let Draco go and punched him awkwardly on the shoulder.

“I don’t want to lose you either, git.”

Draco sniffed. “Do you hate star and constellation names so much that you won’t even speak mine?”

“I just think ‘git’ suits you better.”

That led to a shoving match that made Harry feel better, especially when Draco didn’t try to follow him to the bathroom next time.

*

“Um. Wow, mate.”

Harry nodded and smiled anxiously at Ron and Hermione, who had walked through the front door of Malfoy Manor and then stopped and were staring around. “I know, it’s weird, isn’t it? So huge.”

It had taken some complicated negotiations, but in the end, Healer Letham—once Harry was allowed to visit her again—had helped him figure out ways to ask for his friends to come over. The Weasleys had given their permission, although reluctantly, and Hermione’s parents had done it happily. Harry didn’t think they really knew much difference between one wizarding destination and another.

It was Hermione herself who had been the challenge, and she held herself stiffly, warily, as Draco came around the corner into the entrance hall.

But Draco only nodded to them all, his face perfectly neutral, and glanced at Harry. “Henry, that elf of yours is in the silver drawing room. I think he’ll lose his mind if you don’t let him feed the three of you something.”

And Draco turned and walked away. Harry let out a long, shivering sigh. It had been a week since the kidnapping attempt, and the Malfoys had finally agreed to let him spend time by himself—or by himself with his friends. Harry knew them well enough to be sure that they were watching from a distance with spying spells, but that was at least an improvement over “right in his face.”

“You have your own _house-elf_?”

Ron sounded as though he didn’t know whether to be jealous or not. Harry laughed. “Yeah, it’s a long story. Come on, I’ll tell you.”

Hermione gasped and squealed when she saw Dobby, and then reached out a hand. “How do you do? I’m Hermione Granger.”

Dobby stared at her with his mouth open, and then began to wail. “Dobby has never been asked to shake hands before!”

Hermione grabbed his hand before Dobby could pull it back and shook it once, then turned and looked hard at Harry while Harry waved at Dobby to bring in the food he’d obviously been slaving over. Dobby vanished. “Harry! You never offered to shake his hand?”

“I was a little busy saving him from living in a dark, cold place off the kitchens,” Harry said dryly as he watched Dobby pop in with covered dishes, steaming bowls of soup, treacle tart, cups of hot chocolate, mugs of what might be cider…Harry sighed. There was far more food than any of them would ever be able to eat, weighing down a suddenly-appearing table that ran along the wall next to the fireplace. “The Malfoys treat their house-elves pretty badly.”

“ _Look_ at all this!” Ron grinned and reached for the nearest bowl of soup, which looked like some kind of creamy potato version. “Thanks, Dobby! This is amazing!”

Dobby muffled his sobs when Harry nodded to him, and then vanished. Harry sat down in the chair nearest to the table and reached for a bowl of soup of his own. It really did taste creamy and wonderful.

“Harry. I’m waiting.”

Harry rolled his eyes at Hermione. “Like I said, I was saving him. The Malfoys tried to keep him concealed from me. Dobby was the house-elf who came last summer when I was still living with my rela—the Dursleys. The house-elf who was keeping my post and got me in trouble by floating that cake, remember?”

“I remember!” Ron shook his head and swallowed. “Merlin, that’s weird, mate, but it sounds like it all worked out in the end.” He reached for bread and marmalade.

“The house-elf who was being treated terribly and made to punish himself by his family?”

Hermione sounded horrified. Harry nodded to her. “So I made a bargain with the Malfoys. They don’t yell at the elves or treat them horribly by making them punish themselves anymore, and in the meantime, Dobby is just my elf. They improved the elf quarters, too.”

“And what did you give them in return?”

Ron’s eyes were narrow and shrewd. Harry smiled at him, a little embarrassed. Ron was determined to consider himself stupid next to Hermione, but he was really smart on his own. Just not as much at schoolwork as Hermione. “I promised to act happier, and attend sessions with a Mind-Healer. And not tell the elves to call me Harry instead of Henry. That’s what I told Dobby at first.”

“It sounds good,” said Hermione reluctantly, nibbling at a chocolate biscuit. “But I worry that they’re just slaves, Harry. Have you thought about freeing them?”

Harry snorted. “Then the Malfoys would be so upset that it would make the row over the kidnapping look like nothing.”

“Yes, I saw that story in the papers.” Ron leaned forwards intently. “Black tried to kidnap you right in the middle of Diagon Alley? Is he mental or something?”

“Well, yeah, I think so.” Harry ran his hand through his hair. “But the really scary thing was Mrs. Malfoy. She used a spell on Black to get him to leave me alone. It practically tore his _chest_ apart. The paper had a story one day that she might have killed him, but then apparently the Dementors are still hunting Black, so that’s how they know he’s alive or something.”

“That’s horrible, too,” Hermione whispered.

“Tell me about it.” Harry shook his head and grabbed a treacle tart. “It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. And the worst part is that none of them understand just _how bad_ it was. They just keep saying that they can’t lose me again, and they would do anything to keep me safe. I don’t want that ‘anything’ to include torturing people, though.”

“I kind of understand it,” Ron said, totally unexpectedly. “I know Mum would go mental if someone hurt one of us.”

“Yeah, but she wouldn’t torture someone.”

“I think she would, mate.” Ron was staring into the bowl of soup in front of him as though it held all the secrets of the universe. “I think she might kill someone, even.”

Harry blinked, thrown. Then he said, “All right, but the Malfoys said that Mrs. Malfoy did that because of something called the Black madness. That means your mum _wouldn’t_ actually go mental, because she doesn’t have that.”

Ron’s mouth quirked, but his eyes were unhappy. “All the pureblood families are interrelated, Harry. My mum has Black relatives not that far distant. And my father’s mum was a Black.” He perked up a little. “Hey, I ought to look at the old books and see how closely related we are, now that you’re a Malfoy. We’re probably cousins not too far back.”

“The point is,” Harry said, putting aside the thought for a moment that he might have relatives who weren’t smotheringly overprotective and inclined to torture people on a regular basis, “I don’t want them to torture to protect me, but I couldn’t get them to promise not to do it. And Black is still out there, and he’s been on the Manor grounds at least once, and they don’t know how he’s doing it.”

“That sounds scary.” Hermione reached over and rested a hand on his arm for a second, above the silver bracelet that Mrs. Malfoy wouldn’t let him take off. “Maybe you can—just take extra precautions? I’m not saying that you have to let them cast terrible spells to defend you. Just not take risks.”

“What risks can I take?” Harry asked bitterly. “There’s always someone with me now. I’m amazed that I got to visit you by myself, but maybe that’s because there’s two people with me and we’re right in the center of the Manor. The Malfoys probably think that there’s not that much risk to it.”

Hermione and Ron exchanged a glance that Harry hated, because it felt as if it left him out. Then Hermione faced him and took a deep breath. “I have something to say, Harry, and I know you probably won’t like it, but hear me out.”

Harry felt an unpleasant squeeze happen in the middle of his stomach. “Okay,” he said.

Mrs. Malfoy would have scolded him for sounding ungracious. Hermione just gave him a smile. “The way you talk about them, it’s as if you don’t really belong here. You say ‘the Malfoys.’ You don’t call them Mother and Father, and you don’t talk about yourself like _you’re_ a Malfoy. I think part of the problem is that they think they’re losing you, you’re slipping away, because you don’t seem to acknowledge that you’re part of a family.”

“I don’t _want_ to be part of a family that tortures people!”

“I can’t blame you. But you weren’t talking like you were part of them even before that, were you? You were calling them Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy in your letters to us, and in your head, I’m sure, even if you don’t do it to their faces.”

Harry swallowed as he thought about the Malfoys learning that through the spying spells. But he shook off the fear. Healer Letham said they were his family and wouldn’t abandon him. That meant it was all right if they found out.

“I think,” Hermione went on in an even lower tone, “that they think they might already have lost you, because you’re drifting away from them. And they might lose you if Black kidnapped you again. So it’s hard for them to relax or let you out of their sight, because they’re worried about what you’re going to do. Maybe they’ll turn around and you’ll be gone.”

“Then they shouldn’t torture people,” Harry muttered, but he was thinking about it. Healer Letham had said some similar things, but not so bluntly as Hermione. And Harry was used to listening to Hermione, at least _thinking_ about what she said when she said it.

“I think Hermione’s right, mate.” Ron had a biscuit of his own and was sipping hot chocolate, but he took the time to look at Harry over the rim of the mug in a way that was very familiar. This was Ron’s serious expression, the one he’d had when they were searching for the Philosopher’s Stone their first year. “They’re trying to overprotect you because they assume that you _want_ to disappear. You want to be gone. And when you show that you don’t want to be protected by people who torture kidnappers…” He shook his head. “It just makes it worse.”

“But that’s still true,” Harry said, and straightened his shoulders. “I still don’t want to be protected by people who torture kidnappers.”

Hermione tapped her fingers on the edge of a silver plate. Harry didn’t know if it was Dobby who had chosen the ridiculous, extravagant things, or if it was just that there weren’t any plates in Malfoy Manor that weren’t like that. “Then you need to tell them that. Tell them that you can’t stand seeing them torture people.”

“They acted like it was justified.”

“Well, then go back and argue with them about it again.” Hermione smiled a little. “You said in your letter that you wanted to see us and you wouldn’t be happy until you did. And I bet you said that to them, too, right?”

Harry squirmed in place, especially knowing that Mrs. Malfoy and Mr. Malfoy were probably watching this conversation. Or one of them, anyway. “Um, yeah, I did.”

“They’ll do anything to keep you happy. That has to include not being violent. If they really mean it—if they value _you_ more than they do the chance to torture Sirius Black—then they’ll do it.”

“But just keep in mind that it’s going to be hard for them,” Ron butted in. “I meant what I said about how my mum would go mental if one of us was hurt, Harry. If Black shows up again, then I don’t know how they’ll react.”

“They don’t need to _hurt_ him like that. No one deserves to be hurt like that.”

“What if they think they were hurt like that when Black took you away as a baby?”

Harry winced, but lifted his chin. “That still doesn’t mean that the right thing to do is to try and spread the pain around. The Dursleys thought like that. Dudley and Vernon took it out ln me when they were angry. They shouldn’t think like that. Not if they’re really my family.”

“Tell them that,” Hermione advised him. “See what they say.”

*

“Henry?”

Mrs. Malfoy’s voice was low. She stood in the doorway of her drawing room and stared at him as though she was drowning and he was the one who might throw her a rope. Harry swallowed back the urge to say anything just to make her stop staring like that and asked, “Can we talk?”

“Of course.” Mrs. Malfoy stood aside. Harry walked into her drawing room and looked it over. It was decorated in dense green and silver, and he didn’t think it looked too different from what the inside of the Slytherin common room must look like. At least Draco’s bedroom was less full of House pride.

Mrs. Malfoy motioned him to sit down on a silver stool near the fireplace, and then built up the fire with a swish of her wand when he did. Harry sighed. Did he look cold? He couldn’t tell if he did, or if Mrs. Malfoy was just doing anything she could to make him happy.

_If she’ll do that, then maybe she really will hold off on torturing people._

So Harry decided to be as blunt as he could. He met her eyes and asked, “Can you please never torture people again?”

Mrs. Malfoy clasped her hands around her knees and shivered as if _she_ was the one who was cold. “I was—not myself when that happened. I admit it, Henry. But I would stop Black with any means at my disposal if I thought he would take you again. The only thought going through my mind when he failed to Apparate with you was that he might kill you right there.”

Harry swallowed and nodded. “I don’t think he wants to do that. I think he wants to preserve the Potter legacy. When he mouthed _James_ at me? I think he wants me to go back to being Harry Potter.”

“Do you want to?”

Mrs. Malfoy asked the question in an agonized voice, her hands so tight Harry could hear her bones creaking. Harry shook his head, but she didn’t look that reassured.

“No,” Harry said. “I just—I was never really Harry Potter. I can’t go back to living a lie now that I know the truth. I know Draco was afraid that Black might take me and Memory Charm me, but you know who I am, now. You could get me back. It’s just that Black’s so mental he probably isn’t thinking about that.”

Mrs. Malfoy bowed her head. “Then why do you speak of us—your father and I—as _Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy_?”

 _They did hear it when I said that to Ron and Hermione. Bloody hell._ Harry didn’t spring up and run out of the room, though, even though he really, _really_ wanted to. This kind of courage and facing up to it was something he and Healer Letham had talked about, even though she had thought Harry wasn’t ready to do it yet.

 _Well, I’m a Gryffindor. And I_ chose _to be one, even though the Hat wanted to put me in Slytherin. Time to live up to it._

Harry sighed and said, “Because I still lived the first twelve years of my life as someone else, and then I got pulled back into the family. Can you blame me? It’s still so _strange._ I like having living parents, and I like having Draco as a brother, but I still don’t think of you as perfectly my parents. I barely know who _I_ am.”

Mrs. Malfoy stared at him as if she was having a revelation. Harry just blinked in confusion. He was pretty sure that he’d said all this before, like when he’d refused to take the name Aldebaran and refused Mr. Malfoy’s offer to have him moved to Slytherin House if that was what he wanted.

But maybe it being put in these exact words was what she needed to hear, because Mrs. Malfoy whispered, “Of course. Of _course_ , Henry. I should have thought of that.”

“I know there are things I have to compromise on,” Harry continued. “Like I can’t just go outside alone because Black might be waiting for me, and my name, and not treating Draco the way I treated him before I knew we were brothers. But there are things I _can’t_ compromise on. Things that are right and wrong. Like the way you treated house-elves, and the way you treated Black.”

He leaned forwards and stared at her. “Can we make something that’s not a bargain? Just a promise. I can promise that I’ll never go with Black, no matter what, no matter what he says. And you promise that you don’t torture someone again.”

Mrs. Malfoy swallowed, a tiny bob of her throat. “I meant what I said, Henry. I would use any means at my disposal to keep Black from taking you again.”

“But you could pick and choose the spells,” Harry insisted. “I know that you didn’t use the Unforgivables because you didn’t want to go to Azkaban.” He had looked up the Cruciatus the other day, and even though it sounded horrible, so was the curse that Mrs. Malfoy had actually used. “You could control yourself _that_ much. So next time, you could set up a shield. Or grab me and Apparate away. Or another defensive spell that hurts him, but not as much as the one you used.”

“My poor darling.” Mrs. Malfoy reached out and wrapped her arms around him, as careful and delicate as if he was made of china. “It really scarred you, didn’t it?”

“Yes.” Harry burrowed into her arms, and he could only say this because he wasn’t looking at her face. “If you won’t do it just because hurting people like that is wrong, can you do it for me?”

Mrs. Malfoy crushed him to her, then, and kissed his forehead, over the scar. “Of course. I would do _so much_ for you.”

And Harry found that at least one part of his fantasy of a mum was true: she loved him, fiercely, insanely.

*

Harry woke up. His bedroom window was open, just a little, white curtains ruffling in the breeze. Draco had opened it before he’d gone to bed, claiming he wanted to be cool. He still hadn’t given up sleeping in Harry’s room even though their parents had backed off a little.

Harry sighed and got up to close the window.

And froze when he saw the figure crouched on the sill.

Before he could shout, Black shook his head desperately. His face was pale and brilliant in the faint moonlight.

“Can you hear me out?” he whispered. “Please. I didn’t betray your parents. I didn’t betray them to You-Know-Who. I didn’t kill the Muggles. That was Pettigrew.”

Harry stared at him, and couldn’t think of a single thing to say.


	6. Chapter 6

“Um, I can’t invite you in,” Harry said, looking back over his shoulder. To his relief, Draco was still asleep. “But I can get you something to eat?” Black in human form didn’t look much less starved than his dog form had been.

Black sighed and nodded. “I’d appreciate that. Thank you, Harry.”

Harry went over to the tray of food that Dobby had delivered earlier that day. He had apparently decided that Harry—and Draco—would eat more if he left it to sit than if he took it away again immediately. Harry still had a bowl of soup under a permanent Warming Charm and half a sandwich left. He scooped them up and carried them over to the windowsill, while Black watched him, not moving, then set it down and retreated.

“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t bring you a spoon—”

Black scooped up the bowl and began to drink straight from it, tilting his head back as he slurped. Harry jumped, but, well, he was probably used to drinking that way as a dog, and Harry supposed he couldn’t get too upset about it.

He stayed still and watched Black carefully until Black had drained the soup bowl and eaten the sandwich. Then he settled back with another sigh. “What do you want me to tell you about?”

Harry wavered between the two options for a second, and then chose the one he wanted to avoid less. “What do you mean by saying that you didn’t betray the Potters to Voldemort?”

Black flinched at the name, which maybe was a point in his favor. Surely he’d be used to hearing it if he was a Death Eater? But he looked at Harry with wide, pleading eyes. “They were your parents. Why do you call them the Potters?”

 _Shit._ So this led straight back to the subject Harry hadn’t wanted to talk about after all. He took a deep breath. “Because they weren’t my parents. I know they loved me and they died for me, but they—they went along with you kidnapping me. They didn’t give birth to me.”

“So?” Black uttered a shrill, barking laugh that made Harry glance uneasily over his shoulder again, but then he remembered that Draco had asked Dobby to put up some charms around the bed. He claimed Harry’s snores were so loud that he couldn’t sleep. He probably wouldn’t wake up for this, either.

“I had a horrible family,” Black continued in a slightly quieter voice. “My father just didn’t _care,_ except when it came to wanting me to live up to his ‘proper example.’ My mother was a harridan who tortured us while she tried to make us learn Dark Arts.”

“Us?”

“I had a younger brother. Regulus.” Black’s face was closed-off. “In Slytherin, like all the rest of my wonderful family. He died being a Death Eater.”

Harry swallowed. “But that doesn’t explain why you took me away from the Malfoys.”

Black pointed a finger at him. “Ha! You think of them as the Malfoys! Not really your family at all, are they?”

Harry folded his arms and frowned at him. “Yes, well, you see what it does to your definition of family, to be jerked back and forth between who you were born as and who you grew up as.”

“Who you grew up as is superior,” Black said with no hesitation. “What matters is the family we _choose,_ Harry. The ones who gave us love. I ran away to live with your father’s family when I was sixteen. They were worlds better than my birth family. _Worlds._ I am—I promise you, I took you away from here to give you a better life.”

Harry laughed in spite of himself. “I grew up in an abusive Muggle household with the people I _thought_ were my aunt and uncle and cousin. They made me do all the chores they didn’t want to do, and beat me up—I mean, my cousin did, with his friends—and swung frying pans at my head and locked me in a cupboard and didn’t give me food for a week at a time. Yeah, that was _such_ a better life.”

Black was staring at him in horror, his mouth open. Harry nodded to him. “So that’s what became of your _better life._ ”

“I didn’t know—I had no way of knowing—”

“No, you didn’t,” Harry interrupted, weary of talking about it and already regretting telling him about the Dursleys. Black was one of those people who would make a _huge_ deal out of it, Harry just knew it. “But that’s the point. You didn’t _know_ how things would turn out. What if I’d died in the attack Voldemort launched? What if the Dursleys had starved me to death through sheer neglect? You didn’t know that taking me away from here was actually better than leaving me here, but you did it anyway.”

Black straightened up then, and his mouth set in a very stubborn line. It occurred to Harry that he’d sometimes seen it when he looked in the mirror, both before and after he’d found out who he really was, and that if Mrs. Malfoy was related to the Blacks, so was _he_.

Before he could think more about that, Black leaned forwards and spoke in a low, intense voice.

“No. I promise, Harry, I took you away to a better life no matter what happened. It would still have been a better life even if you’d died with your parents, your _real_ parents, in the attack. The Malfoys are straight-up evil.”

“You mean, like the spell that Mrs. Malfoy cast at you?”

Black nodded once, his eyebrows rising a little, as if he didn’t expect Harry to choose such a good example. “Yes. They live and breathe the Dark Arts. You can’t do that without it corrupting you. I saw it when I lived with my family. Even Regulus, who was a good sort at first—well, at least not _bad_ , just weak and too eager to please—fell to it in the end. Practicing that sort of magic darkens your soul.”

Harry swallowed. “But you must know something about it, because you reversed it. You survived.”

Black laughed again. The sound creaked at the edges, less than sane. Harry managed to squash the impulse to lean away from Black, but it was hard.

“Yes, that’s the way I grew up. I didn’t choose that knowledge.” Black shrugged. “But Cissy could have run away from the family, and not married Lucius, and kept on practicing Dark Arts. Past a certain age, we have a _choice._ She didn’t take it.”

“I didn’t have one.”

Black didn’t seem to notice the quiet tone that Harry’s voice had taken on. He nodded eagerly. “I know. And I didn’t want you to grow up as the child of yet another Dark family, abused the way I was. I took you and gave you a better life. And Lily and James…they were so desperate for children. They should have had the chance to have them on their own. But when they didn’t, and I realized that I could do something about it, I _had_ to do it. It would have been irresponsible of me not to.”

 _Irresponsible._ Harry bit his tongue hard and looked at the ceiling. Then he looked at Black again. “And you didn’t think that Mrs. Malfoy and Mr. Malfoy would feel grief when I disappeared? And Draco, when he grew up and learned about me?”

Black stared at him blankly. Harry wished he dared reach out and shake him. “Didn’t you?”

“No,” Black said hoarsely, blinking. “I told you. They’re evil. They can’t feel that kind of thing. If anything, they would only have mourned because I deprived them of yet another pawn they could put in their stupid _games._ ”

He spat the last word, and Harry jumped. Yes, there was the Black madness peeking through. He didn’t know if Black’s mind had _entirely_ shattered under the pressure of the Dementors, but it was clear that just because he could sit still and speak calmly and refrain from grabbing Harry sometimes, that didn’t mean he was sane.

Harry braced himself. “I think they really did mourn me. Mrs. Malfoy acts like she did.”

Black shrugged. “They have to be good at acting to fool the people who would otherwise never buy that Lucius was under the Imperius Curse. I think they’re good enough at acting to fool themselves, sometimes. But it’s not real. Don’t let them make you think that it’s real, Harry,” he said, and his voice cracked, and he leaned near enough that Harry skittered another few steps backwards. “Don’t. They’ll just fool you and make you into another Regulus if you let them. _I_ won’t do that.”

And his eyes were shining like flame. Harry backed away further, and Black stretched out his hand and kept it extended.

“Lily and James, your _real_ parents, the ones who loved you, chose me as your godfather,” he said, his voice unsteady. “I love you, Harry. Come with me, and you can go back to being Harry Potter.”

“But _how_?” Harry exclaimed, glad that he had the chance to ask Black himself. Even with him being certain that he’d known what Black’s plan was when he tried to snatch Harry in Diagon Alley, that didn’t mean it made _sense._ “Everyone who reads the papers will know that I’m Henry Malfoy now. It’s not like I could show back up as myself and have people just accept it.”

“As _yourself_!” Black crowed. “You know it’s true, Harry! You know that you’re the Potters’ son!”

“It’s a way to refer to it,” Harry said, while silently cursing himself for putting it in a way that would appeal to Black. “But you haven’t answered me. How could I just become Harry Potter again?”

Black gaped at him in silence. Harry folded his arms and stared back. _He didn’t think of that. Typical._

“Well,” Black said, his eyes widening as a new idea visibly occurred to him, “I can use a necromancy ritual.”

“What?” Harry asked weakly. He knew a little bit about necromancy, just because it was the kind of vocabulary word that came up and that you asked questions about when your brother was Draco Malfoy, but he had no idea what it had to do with Black kidnapping him and making him into another person _again._

“There’s a ritual that can give people a new body,” Black said excitedly, pointing at him. “It uses the bone of the father and the blood of the enemy and the flesh of the servant. I know where James’s grave is! We can use his bone, because you are really _his_ son, of course. And I can use my own flesh, because I love you, Harry, I’ll serve you.”

 _He’s mad. Totally mad._ Harry swallowed. “What about the—the blood of the enemy?”

“The house is full of Malfoys, isn’t it?” Black shrugged. For a second, his gaze swung in the direction of Draco’s bed.

Harry felt as though someone had slammed into him, and he took a few moments to breathe through his disappointment. No matter what Black said, he wasn’t an alternative to the Malfoys. He had the same kind of madness as Mrs. Malfoy. He would use the Dark Arts. He just thought that the people he used them on were justified, while Mrs. Malfoy thought the people _she_ used them on were justified.

A wave of longing for Lily and James Potter struck Harry. Would they have loved him without expecting him to make these choices?

But then he remembered that _they_ had known Sirius had stolen him and had adopted him anyway, and used magic to change him so that he looked more like them. And lied to a bunch of other people, like Dumbledore and Snape and so on, to pretend he was theirs. _They_ hadn’t thought that maybe the Malfoys were grieving because their younger son had disappeared.

Harry closed his eyes. It felt so lonely at the moment, like there was no one he could depend on.

But Ron and Hermione’s faces floated into his mind as he stood there. And Healer Letham’s, even. Harry didn’t know if he could trust her not to make him face uncomfortable truths—probably not—but she would keep his secrets and listen to him if he said that he didn’t want to talk about something right now.

And Mrs. Malfoy had promised that she was going to try and use other spells if she saw Black again. And Mr. Malfoy had said he was turning away from Voldemort. And Draco had listened to Harry—eventually—when he said that he didn’t want Draco following him into the bathroom, and Draco had acted like a brother.

Maybe it was just—spread out, Harry thought in wonder, the good and evil that everyone did. Maybe Mr. Malfoy was a Death Eater _and_ someone who loved his children. Maybe Mrs. Malfoy was a crazy mad person _and_ someone who would do anything for him and Draco. Maybe Draco was a stuck-up, pompous git who held ridiculous beliefs about people like Hermione _and_ someone who would fight for him.

But that just meant that there had to be good in Sirius Black, too. Harry opened his eyes and studied Black again. Black already seemed to have forgotten what they were talking about, the disturbing necromancy ritual and everything involved. He was looking down at his hands with a blank face.

“Tell me something,” Harry said, and watched as Black jumped and stared at him. “What did you mean by saying that you didn’t betray the Potters? I was there when Mr. Malfoy questioned you under Veritaserum. He asked you if you were in prison for betraying the Potters, and you said yes.”

“ _Accused_ of it.” Black’s eyes shone with madness again. “I didn’t receive a trial. And the bastard knew exactly what he was doing, asking the question that way. He was a Death Eater, Harry! He would have known I _wasn’t_ one. He wanted to make sure that I was never released, because he knew I would come and get you.”

“The way you did once before,” Harry couldn’t help adding.

Black didn’t seem to hear him. “But it was Peter who betrayed Lily and James. Peter Pettigrew. I swear! I was their Secret-Keeper at first, or I was supposed to be…” Black trailed off for a second. “I can’t remember. It’s hard to remember.” He stared at Harry with eyes that, this time, glittered with tears. “Why is it so hard?”

Harry stood there, and didn’t know what to say.

Black dipped back into his memories. “But I suggested the switch. I was James’s best friend. Everyone would _suspect_ I was the Secret-Keeper. No one would suspect Peter. He was a coward, kept out of things, didn’t even fight with the Order of the Phoenix—”

“The Order of the Phoenix?”

“Dumbledore’s Order. We were some of the only people resisting You-Know-Who.” Black shivered. “Everyone else just wanted to roll over and play dead, pretend that he wouldn’t hurt them that way, or they were _helping_ him. Like Lucius Malfoy, evil bastard that he is.”

Harry hurriedly asked another question, since Black looked ready to rant about the evil of Mr. Malfoy for the next hour or so. “So Pettigrew went and sold them out to Voldemort? Why?”

“Because he was a coward!” Dark fire flashed for a second around Black, which made Harry cautious of what he could do even without a wand, which he still probably had. He prudently scooted further away. “Scurried straight to Voldemort, sold the secret, and then Voldemort came and killed your mum and dad!” He glanced at Harry and seemed to remember who was actually alive and who was dead. “And marked you.”

“What happened then?”

“I came and lent my motorbike to Hagrid.” Black smiled a little when he saw Harry’s confusion. “I had a motorbike, I’d enchanted it to fly. I gave him to you, or Dumbledore gave him to you. I don’t remember, it was a long time ago.” Black rubbed his head as if it hurt. “And then I went after Peter.”

Harry’s chest went cold again. Black said that he was his godfather and loved Harry and he’d stolen Harry to give him a better life, but he’d just run away after Pettigrew? Just like that?

_Maybe because he’s also the sort of man who could kidnap a baby from his parents and assume that was really the best thing he could do for him._

“What happened then?” Harry asked quietly.

“I confronted Peter on a Muggle street. He accused me of being the Secret-Keeper—the liar, the _filthy traitor_ —and then he blew up the street with a spell that killed a dozen Muggles. Blew off his own finger, too. Or cut it off. I don’t remember.” Black rubbed his head again. “Then he turned into a rat and escaped down into the sewers.”

Whatever Harry had expected, it wasn’t that, and he stared at Black in bewildered silence. Black seemed to notice. He sat up and said, “Peter was an Animagus. Same as me. I mean, we were all Animagi, all of us. James was a stag, I’m a dog, of course, and Peter was a rat. And Moony was a werewolf.”

“Moony?”

“Remus Lupin.” Black sighed with what sounded like fondness, but didn’t smile. “He never visited me in prison. He must have thought I was as guilty as all the rest. Or maybe he didn’t forgive me for assuming he was a spy during the war.”

This sounded as bewildering as everything else, and in a way that Harry didn’t think he needed to pay attention to. He changed the subject. “So you think that Pettigrew is still alive somewhere out there? Is that why you broke out of prison, to go chase him?”

“I know he’s still alive,” said Black darkly. “I feel it in my gut.” He clapped his hands over his stomach. And then he seemed to hear the rest of what Harry had asked, and shook his head hard. “No. I know he must be alive, but I don’t know where he is. I came to get you.”

“Because you think I ought to go back to being Harry Potter.”

“I told you, the real families are the chosen ones.” Black’s voice was soft and coaxing again, and he was leaning forwards for the first time in a while. “Not the ones you were born into.”

“But you didn’t give me a choice,” Harry said. “And everyone told me I was born a Potter. It’s not—it’s not the same thing as you running away to live with the Potters when you were sixteen.”

“But you can still have a better life as Harry Potter than you ever can _here._ ” Black looked around scornfully at Malfoy Manor, and then looked at Harry again. “Come on, Harry. We can go and live on the run somewhere, and I’ll teach you all the spells I know, and then we’ll complete the necromantic ritual, what do you say? We can go abroad. There are countries where people have never heard of the Blacks _or_ Harry Potter.”

Only the last part of that sounded tempting. Harry had hated the way people gawked at him when he was still Harry Potter, and there wasn’t much less gawking now that he was walking around with Malfoy features.

But being with a madman didn’t sound tempting. Being adopted or re-adopted or whatever in some kind of insane ritual didn’t sound tempting.

And the thought of what he would leave behind him, and how Mrs. Malfoy would probably cry, halted Harry before he could even think about saying yes.

There was the promise he had made Mrs. Malfoy, too. And his revelation from earlier, that everyone had good and evil in them.

Even Sirius Black did. He shouldn’t have kidnapped Harry, but he hadn’t deserved to be bunged up in Azkaban for twelve years for a crime he hadn’t committed, either.

Harry shook his head. “I want to stay here. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Black’s eyes snapped straight to devastated so suddenly that Harry could see the madness again. “But you’re the only thing I have,” he whispered. “Harry. I’m your godfather. You have to allow me to be your godfather.”

Harry sighed out, long and slow. Black reminded Harry of himself in so many ways. He wasn’t at home in his family, he hadn’t been at home with the Dursleys, and he had been desperate to change things so many times.

But the difference was, Harry was going to stay with the Malfoys and see what happened. He wasn’t going to run away the first time a chance presented itself, especially with the man who had been responsible for him not feeling at home in the first place.

Black had given up. Harry didn’t want to.

“No,” he said. “I don’t want you to get arrested and go back to Azkaban, but I don’t want you to take me.”

Black gave a hollow, desperate laugh. “You don’t have a choice.”

He started to lunge at Harry, but Harry hurled himself over his bed and onto the floor. And then he stood up and called, “Dobby!” even as Black was trying to scramble over the bed.

Dobby appeared between them at once, his head uplifted. “You shall not harm Henry Malfoy!” he snapped at Black, and then snapped his fingers.

A huge, transparent bubble appeared, encasing Black. He floated off the floor, staring at Harry and Dobby in bafflement. Harry swallowed and nodded to Dobby. “Thank you, Dobby.” He paused and looked back and forth between Black and the house-elf. He probably should have asked Black earlier, when he was in his expansive mood, but maybe Dobby would also know. It wasn’t like it would have occurred to the Malfoys to ask. “Do you know how he’s getting through the wards, Dobby?”

“Oh, yes!” Dobby looked delighted to be able to answer. “Mistress Narcissa is being thought of as a threat by the wards of Malfoy Manor when she be marrying Master Lucius. He be having to build exceptions into the wards that not react to the Black madness and let someone who has it cross the boundaries.”

Harry blinked. It seemed odd that the Malfoys wouldn’t have thought of that, but then again, perhaps Mr. Malfoy had thought it was only Mrs. Malfoy it would let in, or maybe that had been long enough ago that neither of them had thought about it in a long time.

“Thank you, Dobby,” Harry said, and looked at Black. “Can you take him over the boundaries and then do something to make sure that he won’t come back in?”

Dobby gave him a cowed look. “Dobby cannot be adjusting the wards without permission from Master Lucius, Master Henry.”

 _Henry._ Harry listened to the name, and nodded in acknowledgment of it. If he kept nodding, if he kept working with it, then he thought the name would probably transform in his mind.

_I won’t give up._

“But,” Dobby said, and suddenly seemed to perk up, “Dobby can be doing other things!” He faced Black and clapped his hands together, then held them there and closed his eyes. He seemed to be concentrating deeply.

Black abruptly shrieked, and then fainted in his bubble. Harry blinked at him, then at Dobby, who was sitting on the floor and breathing hard. Harry knelt down next to him. “What did you do, Dobby?”

Dobby beamed at him. “Dobby be taking the Black madness away! Now Mr. Black be being sane, and not able to cross the wards!”

Harry stared. “Thank you, Dobby,” he said at last. His head was reeling. Were house-elves really that powerful?

_Who’s ever asked them?_

“Please put him somewhere far away from the Manor,” Harry said faintly. Dobby jumped up after a minute, nodded so hard that his ears hit him in the face, and then walked over to the window. The bubble floated in front of him, and after a minute, they both disappeared, the bubble dodging out the window and Dobby popping away.

Harry stood there a second longer, thinking about the choice he’d made, holding it to him.

Then he turned around.

And saw Draco sitting up in bed, staring at him.

“Um,” Harry said, feeling as awkward as hell. “Hi. How long have you been awake?”

“Long enough to hear Black say that he was innocent of the one crime, but not the worse one,” Draco said quietly. He went on studying Harry.

Harry breathed out hard, and tried to ignore the fact that Draco thought that killing a dozen Muggles and running away was less bad than kidnapping him as a baby. Harry hadn’t thought of the Muggles part very hard, either, except to think that it meant Black didn’t deserve to be in prison. “Yeah.”

“And you chose not to go with him.” Draco’s voice was slightly warmer now.

“Yeah.” Harry looked his brother in the eye. “My place is here.”

Draco smiled at him, and jumped out of bed to hug him. Harry hugged him back, a little surprised. He’d thought Draco would be more upset than this and demand some sort of reckoning, but it didn’t appear that he would.

The door opened then, and Harry looked up, half-convinced it would be Dobby, even though he would have just appeared in the room. But it was Mrs. Malfoy, holding up her lighted wand and frowning at both of them.

“Henry? Draco? One of the house-elves woke us and said there was an intruder that your Dobby took care of?”

“There was,” Harry said, and braced himself to look at her, stepping gently away from the hug Draco still wanted to give him. “Black was here.”

Mrs. Malfoy looked ill. “And what did he want?”

“He wanted to take me away and use a necromancy ritual to make me into Harry Potter again.”

Mrs. Malfoy actually swayed. Harry ran over and grabbed her arm tightly, and then turned her around and made her sit on the bed. Mrs. Malfoy licked her lips and focused on him. “And you chose to not go with him?”

“Henry resisted him, Mother,” Draco said proudly. “Even when he was talking rot about being innocent of the crime of killing the Muggles and betraying the _Potters_. He said he wanted to take Henry away and give him a ‘real life,’ but Henry said he wanted to stay _here._ ”

Mrs. Malfoy looked intently at Harry, her eyes glimmering with soft light. “Is that true, Henry?”

Harry nodded slowly. He wondered for a second if he should tell her about the wards and Black not coming back anymore and the fact that house-elves could probably cure her madness, too, but he could do that later.

There was something more important he wanted to do right now.

He said, “Yes, Mother.”

Mrs. Malfoy’s eyes were as warm as her arms when she hugged him.

Harry leaned against her, and hugged her back.

He could try. He _would_ try.

 **The End**.


End file.
